A Fragile Architecture by Marshall Ford

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

by Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

All text written before the project.

Marshall Ford

Suicide

Thesis

Characters

Original

100

168 188

Ego Art

Nonmodern

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Audacity

210

God

224

Madness

260

Nothing

272 326

Town Site

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Architecture

430

Bibliography

A Fragile Architecture

Suicide

Marshall Ford

Ego is freedom. In the end, what I am trying to prove is the deeper I get into the work being the direct result of pushing my own ideas, pushing my ego deeper and deeper into comfortably uncomfortable territory, the broader the engagement with architecture becomes. The idiosyncratic nature of a selflessly e otistical and personal architecture is both liberating and engaging, shattering the shell of a calcified arrogance too often synonymous with the architectural discipline. The greatest architecture in the world challenges everyone, running up against a place in a tectonic shift of momentous vernacular reconfiguration. Architecture has the power to change a place, people, and the architect themselves, and ego is the freedom that allows that power in architecture. Pushing oneself toward a completely uncomfortable and idiosyncratic place, unfamiliar in even the most familiar situation is necessary to push the edges of the discipline in productive ways. Becoming comfortable with the uncomfortable realm of the curious, naive, risky, and experimental is entirely egotistical, but this indulgence is necessary to move the discipline forward. The liberation of an architect at the intersection of necessarily egotistical and personally exposed permits an incredibly powerful but fragile architecture with universal appeal and the broad engagement that moves architecture past pedagogy, practice, and the discipline, towards the sublime. The danger of an egotistical architecture is a broader assumption of selfishness shaped or guided by contemporary social, cultural, and political challenges, both inside and outside architecture. The necessity of an egotistical architecture beckons loudly as such challenges begin to quiet the discipline and shatter the architectural potential of the untouchable into niche games, theoretical anxiety, and vacuous trends.

A Fragile Architecture

If this is a slaughter, as John Stilgoe predicts, it will be purposeful. This project is about the power of ego in architecture and thus must contain some sort of ego, but it must also be selfless in order to accomplish some sort of discovery into the human role of the architect. If I am going to find what is suddenly a rare yet valuable artifact in architecture (vulnerability, curiosity, selfless ess, or fragility that is essentially and necessarily human) I must also, in a sense, become arrogant. Those who believe they can change something must. Those who believe they can find something lost are insane. Their inherent belief (faith) in discovering something yet to be discovered through a series of principles or definitions or experiments is allowed to be selfish and haotic, but not misguided. For most theses, students know something and try to prove it is important or really exists. A hallway defines a typology; a certain method creates something important; or architecture is something and needs to be something else. Maybe mine is none of them. Maybe mine is all three. At the moment it seems to be right outside the discipline, technically at least, but the issue is that in the end it must be a thesis, not speculation or religious writing. It must be architectural and, most importantly, move architecture forward (exposing the inevitability of moving backwards). This project is not about a new typology, it is about a present architecture. We are responsible for moving architecture forward in a period of time when everything is moving laterally. Yet again, I arrive at the arrogance and egocentric purposefulness that this project is meant to explore. It is not a clean subject and soon this book will start to get lost, messy, and fractured. But amongst the chaos is where lost things are found, because without such turmoil the friction necessary to move something somewhere disappears, and suddenly all we are left with is a shell.

Marshall Ford

Salk Institute

De Rotterdam

Hills of Mexico City

Inland Steel Building

Crown Hall

Glasgow School of Art

Johnson Wax Factory

The Pantheon

Sheats House

Personal objects of necessary experience.

A Fragile Architecture

I’m hesitant to fly too close to the modernists and the impressionists as they explored the potential in subconscious expression. First, because Pollock's uncontrolled beauty needs no structure and is easily denied. Architecture is not denied because we exist within it, and thus must become something that transcends, through mutations, logistics, or chaos, the realm of the aesthetic, or simpler, the strictly visual experience. While Rothko can evoke emotions from many, architecture must demand experiences from all doing so within it’s own context while supplying the necessary power for an emotional temporary existence in a place. The evocation of a necessarily transcendental human experience is the truest architecture of a place. Without the potential to impact the human condition, architecture is nothing. Without the allowance of an architect’s fragility, this impact is impossible. As this project becomes more personally motivated, yet less personally focused I begin with rare moments of architectural excitement I’ve found; undeniable sublimes within a built work, sometimes purposefully monumental and other times accidentally sublime. Although I always question if anything is really accidental because every great architecture began as a thought deep in the mind of a person emotionally impacted by their past and future. Take the Salk Institute, a place I’ve used countless times as the beginning for projects that never end up anything like it. It’s an architecture that feels perfect but rough, solid but floa ing, and silent in stature but as loud as a church choir in experience. Yet somehow it is a portrait of Kahn himself, not a masterpiece of a master builder, but an honest architecture of an impossibly fragile man. Other buildings reflect a similar experience of

Marshall Ford

impossible brilliance, famously Miesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Crown Hall in Chicago or the quiet arches in the driveway of the Johnson Wax Factory in Racine. Other monumental architectures are stained with human experience visible within the building itself, to the point where the original architecture is simply the machine that allowed eras to happen within it. Mackintoshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Glasgow School of Art is monumental for both its position on a hill overlooking downtown Glasgow, and the infinite moments occurring over centuries inside. Remnants of these moments are found in the design and theory of the place while the architecture solidifies over time into an immovable mass. Recently fire destroyed much of the timeless patina in many of the most important rooms including my favorite room in the world: the library. Suddenly much of the building is gone (including the library), but the architecture remains. Is this all a matter of opinion? I argue that opinion does not lie in whether a building has power, it exists in the degree of power. Architecture with power cannot be denied, and if it must, it must be denied forcibly to the point where the emotion involved is greater than succumbing to the power, and thus the building becomes infinitely powerful through this denial. At the point of the sublime in architecture, cynicism is pointless, and optimism is stupid. Every building has an emotion embedded within it implanted by the architect themselves and the expression of this emotion leads others to experience that emotion in personal and perhaps very different ways. The purpose of architecture is not to stir emotion but to allow the opportunity for a human to do so. Each person has their own ego and ability (or inability) to be affected by an object of concrete or wood or glass. The responsibility of

A Fragile Architecture

the architect is to create a functional architecture embedded with a quality of human spirit. Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not get too emotional. Architecture must withstand forces of humans and nature. The ability to construct a building that lasts forever is a talent lost over the past 200 years. Instead of Pantheon ambitions we begin to settle for buildings with a lifespan, a temporarily evocative thing meant to crumble under human hands or natures fury within a foreseeable time-frame. The motivations for this are mostly political, and perhaps economical, but not at all architectural (unless specifica ly stated that a building is to crumble over time, like Prada Marfa). Timelessness is not only emotional, but also physical. The power of the pyramids seems untouchable, yet, unless we believe alien theories, human beings are solely responsible for the image and the eternity of perhaps the most famous structures in world history. Part of what makes the world wonders so mythical is that only one is still standing, yet all were keystones of human achievement. â&#x20AC;&#x153;One of sevenâ&#x20AC;? enthralls the human imagination because of the rarity in such numbers and the implied mystery of the other six. Monumentality is not only associated with rarity, however. Something more human secures a monument in global memory; a testament to human power of achievement or personality. The greatest minds in the history of building are working today, and although glimpses of their timeless genius are found globally, something else begins to slaughter their futures, an improper ego. Maybe a new ego, one that no longer solidifies the architect in his work but alienates him from it. The fragility of architects themselves is now forbidden as bidding wars and publication battles wage in schools and office , and suddenly the sublime is pushed aside in search of something more provocative or mathematically correct. The

Marshall Ford

The Subterranean Labyrinth of the Gothic House by Lequeu

Salk Institute would be impossible today. The Pantheon would be a joke. The provocations nowadays are Atelier van Lieshoutâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sperm and Zahaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s accidental vaginas; projects that stun. Though, if architects are afraid of doing something done before, they are inevitably lost forever. Centuries before van Lieshout, LeQueu was perfecting the vulgar and architecturally representing the almost-too-perfect human form in directly translated building (or monument, whatever it would be called); a surreal result of the mathematics of humanity. Even math is provocative. Timelessness is not tied to obscenity. In fact, timelessness is not tied to anything except time itself. Our only evidence otherwise are our personal experiences with a place that allow us to transcend time into something more emotional or personal. One of the greatest difficulties in this project is proving that the architect provides transcendence, and that the building

A Fragile Architecture

itself is a result of the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s personal ability to understand the human condition to a point where their ego allows them to do so, a professional with the ability to listen completely while telling the client that they know exactly what they want. Thus, I am trying to prove that ego is the vehicle for the architect as a person to create opportunities for transcendence or the sublime. I am also working in direct contrast to the harmful, weak, artificial ego leading to a certain vacuity in architecture today. Although seemingly contradictory, the ability for an architect to expose themselves, or allow fragments of themselves to enter into architectural discourse through buildings or otherwise, provides a transcendental power slowly being lost to computer generation and an era of architects propped up by their necessity to produce either strictly egotistically or for reasons of money. It is a fear of falling behind which forces architects to fall behind. I am inclined to be specific that this is not due to a lack of confidenc , but more an inflamed anxiety to find something beautiful and necessary, seen even in top design schools. Architecture is, and will always be necessary. By removing the fear of unimportance, perhaps architects can once again find their way to power, or at least something meaningful. In order to do this a new architecture must be introduced; an architecture safe from modernist rationality and postmodernist cynicism. Essentially this new, nonmodern architecture must be devoid of any rationalized label because in the end it must be human, and even the most reasoned human is deeply irrational. As the architect becomes a greater part of her architecture, her inherent human irrationality, through the power of ego, transcends itself into a strange chaotic rationality. It is not the suicide of the ego, or the architect, or the building itself; it is the suicide of emptiness, the purposeful removal and end of nothing, and the rediscovery of everything.

Rudolf Steiner's Second Goetheanum under construction > 12

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

The Kahn center for monumental serenity.

The honorary trophy for American capital and innovation.

The tomb of American innovation and courage.

The future memorial of Dutch stoicism and sarcasm.

The memorial of human topographies.

The gateway towards a precise architecture.

The mausoleum of one manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s everything.

The ancient monument to timelessness and humanism.

The commemorative roof of Hollywood past.

Objects of obvious monumentalities.

Marshall Ford

Kahn’s melancholy.

Rem’s religiosity.

Human perseverance.

SOM’s lightness.

Mies’ control.

Mackintosh’s solitude.

Frank’s heaviness.

Ancient understanding.

Lautner’s bravery.

Objects of basic (human) essences.

A Fragile Architecture

Ego Selfish Self-centered Confident Shielded Comfortable Unwieldy Stubborn Objective Apathetic Conceit Hubris Words related to arrogant.

Pride

Marshall Ford

Fractured Fragile Exposed Honest Endearing Susceptible Transparent Engaging Charitable Available Bare Spartan Words related to vulnerable.

A Fragile Architecture

Thesis

Marshall Ford

Ego is freedom. Arrogance is captivity. The deeper an architect gets into their work as a direct result of pushing their ego and ideas further than they are comfortable, to a point of liberation, the more universal architecture becomes. The selfless e otist builds a universal architecture; an architecture that challenges everyone. Origins place architecture at the core of our ego. Ego frees architecture from ourselves.

A Fragile Architecture

Fragility The fragility of architecture is inherently human. Columns and beams and walls must hold some rigidity and thus architecture is non-fragile or else it will break. Meanwhile the necessity of architecture to do something for people forces this vulnerability to be eliminated, or reconsidered. If humans are inherently fragile and architecture is necessarily rigid, architecture cannot be human until the ego/arrogance that supports the architect herself is carefully broken. But an impossibility lies in this necessity. To believe that architecture can make anything different, or better, is arrogant. But to believe that ones self can create architecture is crucial to the future and past of profession and the built environment. The arrogance of the architect is necessary, but is it possible to move past arrogance to a point where the architect can create architecture without the shield of the ego? This is a truly personal architecture with an inherent fragility but a deeper strength than that sculpted from the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s required arrogance. Why is it necessary to create personal architectures? What purpose does fragility serve in such a profession, built on rigidity and supported by a necessary strength, other than finding some sort of more â&#x20AC;&#x153;humanâ&#x20AC;? architecture? Perhaps that is it; maybe an element of humanism can save architecture from vacuity caused by technology, arrogance, and bureaucracy. A vacuity birthed by architects themselves drowning in potential anonymity or purposelessness, with ego as their only weapon. Suddenly fragility architects must have in order to understand the human condition is necessary to find ar hitecture again.

Marshall Ford

First thesis with thoughts.

A Fragile Architecture

Vulnerability Opposite an inherent fragility is a potentially dangerous vulnerability for the architect. In order to create an architecture that meets the human condition the architect themselves must become vulnerable without breaking. To create architecture for humans, the architect must reveal themselves to a huge degree, many times in an act demanded by the client. But this vulnerability is balanced with the ego that allows the architect to believe they can understand a person or community more than those people understand themselves. This sort of assumption is a necessary risk for the future of architecture on the macro and micro scale. For a specific project to come to fruition means all involved must assume a certain amount of responsibility and handle that responsibility with their ego. For architecture to progress as a whole, a certain amount of arrogance or ego is required for the literal construction of the future. But for the sake of humanism in the new age of architecture, greater importance lies in the ability for those architects to remain vulnerable, and in a sense, human. Love Often defined as an uncontrolled emotion guided by desire and something less tangible, love creates architecture for both the architect and the user. Love transcends the necessity to create only a functional architecture and allows the sublime to creep in as architecture becomes not only personal, but undeniably human. In order to create a loving architecture the architect must provide the opportunity for moments of engagement, transcendence, or awakening. Engagement traps the person exactly where they want to be; where they are. Architecture seduces, allowing the user to love, or at least discover,

Marshall Ford

almost always unintentionally, the vulnerability to experience a place without hesitation or reserve. The results of this vulnerability through true engagement are purely human and create the fragility necessary to return to architecture. Transcendence occurs when the architecture is no longer itself but rather a place where we redefine our experience with the world through the lens of necessary built form. Freedom Freedom likes a good fight with ego. While ego allows the architect to practice freely and explore further, true freedom is quelled by the overbearing “me.” The ego allows the architect to explore, experiment, and fail successfully. But it is possible for the ego to solidify into an unmoving caricature (or character) of the former self that explored freely. Essentially the architect’s arrogance can halt personal and/or professional progress, and preserve a repetitive cycle of similarity in architecture. Some easy keywords for the result of this arrested development are one liner, lazy, boring, expected, and most frightening for the starchitect, signature. Thus freedom is a critical component in the freshness and power of personal architecture, the degree of which seems to parallel the potential of certain architects to affect change, human behavior, emotions, and the discipline itself. More freedom means potentially more power. Transcendence of the art requires freedom. As Philip Johnson said about Louis Kahn, “He was his own artist. He was free compared to me.”1

1 My Architect: A Son’s Journey. Prod. Nathaniel. Kahn. Dir. Nathaniel. Kahn. A New Yorker Films Release, 2003.

A Fragile Architecture

Work Types The spectrum of work in contemporary architecture is constantly broadening as technology grows alongside ego and the wealth of those who choose to afford an architect. On one side is the extremely personal; work done for the architect themselves or emotionally dedicated to another cause. Examples include the Soane Museum in London or Phillip Johnson’s Glass House. On the other end is the anti-personal work, sometimes with personal intentions but stalwart in its critique or detached existence, essentially defin d by Rem Koolhaas and the more radical Dutch fi ms from the 90’s. Neither side is correct nor incorrect, but the spectrum is widening, and the space between is highly saturated with both confusion and emptiness. What is the architect’s duty at this point? Does architecture need to be saved from vacancy or is this the moment where greatness in architecture is found within the chaos of everything else? In the era of excess, architecture begins to mean less and less. The power that lies in both ego and a willingness to become vulnerable is suddenly more important than ever to transcend the emptiness caused by excess, and introduce an architecture never seen before, because it was never necessary. The shield of arrogance is no longer penetrable and architecture is losing it’s humanity. Maybe that is progress. But students are no longer familiar with the daring, failure is no longer permitted mathematically or electronically, and architecture is quickly losing power. Though the spectrum is widening between the personal and the anti-personal work, the threshold of what is constructed is shrinking to a point where all ideas are distilled into a buildable, non-controversial, politically acceptable box of rooms. The only way to shatter this process is to introduce the strength of the ego through the vulnerable fractures of humanity.

Marshall Ford

The Personal Work: created for the architect or artist himself with a personal rationale (or insanity) and an obviously self-defined self control. [Soane Museum]

The Signature Work: potentially repetitive amongst other projects of the same creator, grand, empty, monumental, or sublime. The signature work becomes the architect themselves, for better or worse; so famous, so inherent to place, it becomes pop culture; a caricature that everyone wants. [Guggenheim Bilbao]

The Anti-Personal/Critical Work: personality infused yet ideologically separated project instilled with a critical power but purposefully devoid of outward personal expression, or so it seems. [Darwin, by Atelier van Lieshout]

A Fragile Architecture

A Town for Myself

A House for Myself

Architorium (Exploratorium) Monument to Myself Architorium (Madhouse)

Marshall Ford

Program Program introduces potential and allows limitations. It eliminates infinite possibilities that often convolute more experimental architecture. Especially in the purposefully personal project many parameters (possible limitations) are essential for a focused and powerful result. A program of unlimited limitations is possible in the hands of the selfless egotist. All potential programs are harvested from the ideas mentioned earlier in this chapter but are rigorously sculpted to define a client and architecture that will (potentially) most powerfully and purposefully allow an exploration of a new architecture. The client may be a person, an era, and attitude, or architecture itself. Whatever needs architecture the most will receive it. The client is me. The list to the left is a result of a narrative experience and practice of egotistical architecture. All initial ideas are archived in order to preserve necessary artifacts of the project. Program is a story of project, place, and architect. In order to investigate the power of ego I am building for myself and where I came from. Other People How does this project avoid being about the opinions of people outside architecture? First, the definitions guiding the thesis are scientifi ally and mathematically established. For instance, the definition of arrogance is not interpreted by others but instead defined y philosophy and dictionary definition . Secondly, ego must be defined within the parameters of architecture as a profession and the character of the architect themselves, a defini ion I establish from both experience and data. This means once definitions are established within the contexts of dictionaries and writing,

A Fragile Architecture

they must be directly applied to architecture itself, and not filtered through outside sources. However, outside sources in other fields hold valuable personal information and experience that lead to a broader and more direct understanding of the relationship between ego, practice, and universal appeal. In the end, this inevitably becomes a personal project. Data Our exposure online is our choice. We choose to expose ourselves online discretely, otherwise, we would allow exposure in real life (for a moment letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ignore the argument of the internet as real life). But so many humans do not have the courage to exist as a person when they have a more shielded option guarded by anonymity, avatars, and unverifiable lies. Our contemporary existences are like a main street of window display personas where others can look at everything we offer, but never interact with us. Why the hell would somebody want to see us? The world is now full of static window displays with nothing to buy. The architect is a unique character in this new stage set life for they must sell their product habitually through a display of image and ego yet must also posses the courage to expose themselves personally, and listen completely to understand what people want, how people will react, and what society needs. This constant exposure and shielding of ego is life on a professional battlefield as the client fights with not only the product they are paying for but the person that is working behind the scenes both physically and mentally. This environment surely tests most architects to their personal limits of exposure and convinces many to construct a permanent boundary between themselves and their architecture. Perhaps this is when the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work begins a process of ambiguity and neutrality. Once the architect removes themselves from their product, what are they producing?

Marshall Ford

The architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s storefront.

A Fragile Architecture

The end results of such a process are shells, constructed from the power and ability that the architect has set in motion indefinitel , but moving nowhere as a product of simple static motion. Data begins to creep in as a veil to a less personal architecture, a patina on a neutral architecture produced by the architect camoufla ed by Googleimaged buildings that look like _______ (insert architect name here). Parametricism’s objective technical and aesthetic value is lost as it becomes the mathematical solution for a nothing architecture. But data plays an even greater role on a personal level of the architect and the user. Immediate and unlimited photography sets the stage for a snapand-shoot architecture full of instant attraction but vacant of transcendant possibility found in the buildings constructed prior to the pixelated memory insurance of the digital camera. And all of these images float ambiguously organized on the web in a seemingly unlimited stream of data, that is actually intricately limited to show you only the most relevant image or information. Sadly, many will never know where LeCorbusier’s scar came from. This is not to say that architecture has lost it’s potential to allow humans to experience undefinable moments of awe, or disgust, or sadness, or something powerful, but it has allowed architecture to get lazy. Architects themselves are working twice as hard, however, trying to find some way to provide a thing that impresses and imprints on the momentary observer for more than a moment. Chaos, Insanity, and Absurdity The project of architecture’s humanity is chaotic. General theory attempts to couch some sort of understanding of humans and their behavioral and

Marshall Ford

emotional makeup, but this is impossible to represent in anything other than a human being. This building will not be a human being. Instead it will be the architecture created by the architect while acknowledging and harnessing the power that lies somewhere in the exposed and necessarily fractured architect’s ego. It is an architecture not overshadowed by ego but powered by it and an honest understanding of personal intentions. The result may touch upon unintelligible or impossible as a direct result of the freedom and absurdity of the human mind and it’s abilities. For over a century, architecture has struggled to protect the architect from themselves, coining terms and founding (or finding) styles in order to avoid the passions of the builders themselves. Few have escaped this overbearing pressure to create timeless architecture devoid of a fetishized style. Architecture is trapped right now. It needs chaos; it needs absurdity, it needs a sort of irrationality that allows it to become awesomely rational: humanly rational. In the insanity of humanity, architecture can result in the sanity necessary for timelessness. Think of the chaos of a 100 person orchestra: the possibility of absurdity and chaos is greater than almost any other art, yet with the coordination of all individual players the result is inexplicably human in its expression, organization, and passion. Architecture must be an orchestra, not an instrument. Constructed Weakness Vulnerability connotes weakness in the more prestigious schools of architecture, and this weakness invites ignorance of the vulnerable. “Once you’re good at something you believe you can be good at everything,” John

A Fragile Architecture

The 120 player Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam is widely considered the greatest orchestra in the world. Founded in 1888 the orchestra has only had 6 chief conductors but over 1000 recordings. [http://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/ story/0,,269492,00.html]

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

Stilgoe states about the current moment in design, â&#x20AC;&#x153;past confi ence is arrogance, a habit of taking risks, almost like gambling. People who are arrogant possess some sort of luck.â&#x20AC;?2 At the point of arrogance another sort of weakness begins: the inability to move forward at a steady pace. For some, they begin to take larger and larger risks, doubling down on eventual failures, leading to critical and certain failure. For others, the risk taking is over, and architecture becomes stagnant. This is the more common issue in contemporary design landscapes resulting from a sort of comfort caused by the satisfaction of fame and the gathered arrogance of a previously critical or forward thinking philosophy. Arrogance makes one live right on the edge in an exciting position of power hovering above vulnerability or, even worse, weakness. The greatest danger of exposure for the architect is a potential image of weakness which leads to scorn and a loss of stature. The architect is supposed to be egotistical. He must. Yet at the same time the architect is ultimately responsible for people, for even the most insular projects like Johnsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Glass House are designed to integrate with landscape, to respect principles of design, and ultimately built with an incredible intimacy with the human condition, no matter how much a building is a seemingly selfish portrait of the architect themselves. In fact, the Glass House is a literal exploration in the exposure of the architect as a person, both personally expressive in the detailing of the architecture itself, and the voyeuristic design for one, while also strengthened ideologically by the arrogance of Johnson. Insecure Confidenc The weight of expectation is heaviest at the core of a person. Human ability to enlarge an intangible idea into something so large that it becomes 2 Conversation with John Stilgoe (11/4/2014)

Marshall Ford

Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan CT

A Fragile Architecture

Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of architecture. By Rem Koolhaas. almost tangible is both incredibly powerful and irritatingly dangerous. The heavier the weight, the greater the sense of insecurity as we struggle to manage our ability to match expectations while retaining our personal expectations of character, morality, and beauty. We crave the beautiful and value the satisfaction in finding it, but the demanding pressure for other things distracts us from the simplicity of the beautiful and leads us towards a convoluted mash of everything else. Who doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to be Rem? We deride those who reach a moment in their careers where they slow forward momentum and deify those who never step on the brakes. Arrogance in architecture transcends these men and gods, and permeates into the thinnest cracks of the profession. Koolhaasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; arrogance is different than Gehryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s but they share the same egocentric momentum in the profession.

Marshall Ford

I wanted this project to be as big (in every sense) as the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The expectations were set, the precedent was clear, and I just began. But ego is not about size and arrogance is not manifested only in the humongous. Sacrificing resolution of anything (architecture, images, love) in order to match an expectation is the beginning of tragedy; pixels cannot be refined changes to them are destructive and relentless. This project may be larger (or smaller) than any other strictly out of necessity, but the fame that Rem found from that thesis project is not due to its size or sarcasm, but because of his speech, his thought, and the project itself. This project is personal and not utterly critical, although it intends to be very sharp. Maybe there will be a chapter about fame in here, but I think the whole project is about it, and the exact opposite: nothing. Childhood Seriousness Children are the most serious at their jobs. Straightforward, honest, and brave with intentions as pure as their craft. A child's arrogance is unmatched by those aware of their talents or abilities. The naivetĂŠ in the seriousness of children doing things they are not good at doing is the sort of freedom that dissipates as we get older and mature. Innocence is powerful in its assuredness. Studies show that artists tend to posses childlike qualities that allow them to explore a range of experiential interpretations: "Artists may prefer independence for their freedom to generate innovative, unconventional ideas. A tender-minded tendency may allow artists to be more sensitive to the different interpretations of experience. This might help them to empathize and experience a wide range of feelings."3

3 Roy, Debdulal Dutta. "Personality Model of Fine Artists." Creativity Research Journal 9.4 (1996): 392

A Fragile Architecture

The complexities in such a study may be boiled down into a result showing a link between the childhood tenderness and independent thought, and the creative genius that is facilitated by an almost naive optimism: "Imagination may help artists to feel an inner world and to express themselves in an unusual and aesthetic manner. The present results indicate that sensitivity or tender mindedness (I+) may be inhibited by shrewdness (N+) and anxiety (Q4+), and may be facilitated by optimistic and happygo-lucky temperament (F+)."4 Other studies into the link between creativity and ego suggest that arrogance is not mutually exclusive with hostility that, in fact, those who explore the boundaries of creative familiarity " may not be humble, but they also arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hostile."5 This provides a link between the gentle-mindedness of the previous study and the arrogance of children, a harmlessly aggressive childlike experimentation that may provide a wider understanding or perception of emotions and landscapes, and the sort of norm-bending fascination that accompanies the people, namely architects, that we associate with the avant-garde, the strange, and the necessarily audacious.

4 Roy, Debdulal Dutta. "Personality Model of Fine Artists." Creativity Research Journal 9.4 (1996): 392 5 Jacobs, Tom. "The Focused Arrogance of the Highly Creative." Pacific Standard. .p., 7 July 2011. Web.

Marshall Ford

Original map of terms sketch rooted in ego the primary topic.

A Fragile Architecture

Cromlech

Gallery Graves

Menhirs

Control Chaos

Passage Graves

Henges

Megalithic Chamber Tombs

Trilithons

Megalithic Monuments

Stellae Monumental Pillars

Monument

Money

Risk

Books

Timelessness

Invincibility

Freedom New Partnerships Failed Companies Bankrupt Projects Richest Architects Lists

Sex Bling

Celebrity

Fame

Ego Gifted/Exceptional Responsible Deserved Undeserved Confiden Elitism Due Magical Blessed God Spirituality Morality

Architect God Stupidity Power Pride Confidenc Built Work Fragility Repetition

A map of necessary terms for the exploration of the architect as ego.

Marshall Ford

Empathy Understanding

Sublime

Melancholy

Humanity Power Good Things Vulnerability

Speechless

Irrationality Change

Lust Love Awe

Emotion

Suicide

Fragility

Disguise Decoration Brittleness Temporality Skin Protection

Origins

Shell

Home Town Love House

Arrogance Pride

Power

Temporality

Edge

Self

Luck

Illusions of Greatness

Risk

Destruction

Chaos

Transparency

Weakness

Sin

Shell

Hell Heaven God

Humility Respect Weakness Friendship Trust Refinemen Lucidity

A Fragile Architecture

Characters

(A Portrait Gallery of Noteworthy Architectural Egos)

Marshall Ford

Frank Lloyd Wright

Le Corbusier

Louis Kahn

Mies Van Der Rohe

Philip Johnson

Peter Zumthor

Thom Mayne

Zaha Hadid

Peter Eisenman

Frank Gehry

Rem Koolhaas

Bjarke Ingels

A Fragile Architecture

Introductions A necessary tangibility is found in the drawings and projects of the most famous architects, especially profound in their first and masterpiece works. At the beginning of all careers a certain amount of vulnerability and sacrifice is necessary to move forward and thus many first works by people like Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind are incredibly experimental, curious, and soaked with latent potential for the untouchably legendary in their brutal honesty and authenticity. This work seems shaky, rough, overwhelming, and inexplicable but the results not only surprise, but peek into the fertile pasts of groundbreaking and utterly original human beings. The arrogance builds later on the grounds of such projects but remains completely absent in the first works. A duality between the expectedly courageous, and the surprising and beautifully untrained solidifies the original works of such architects as the concrete foundations for dominating careers. The following cast of 12 are people placed doubtlessly in the canon of recent architectural theory and practice, influencing the outlooks and aesthetics of lesser known practices and students alike. But what are these influences really? At the core such wide impact on a profession like architecture is driven by the egos and necessary egos of such people, but the remainder of the power found in the younger days of such people many times results in the most iconic work. The experimentation and curiosity of the green and untrained designer leads to the moments of buildable power so crucial in the formation of a signature style, personality, or image. The danger is when these moments calcify into an unmoving stylistic product, not financially threatening or necessarily ugly, but dangerously confident and vacuously arrogant. The riskiness of arrogance leads to

Marshall Ford

movements, the comfort of arrogance leads to stagnation. The characters in this chapter possess the power to do either at maximum levels. All have incredible influe ce on the profession and future character of architecture. All possess the ego to sustain such influenc , or to destroy it. They are tragic and heroic, marking landscapes with beauty and leaving a trail of personal desire or anguish in the amalgamated image of their creations. The most personal work is found in the first projects of such characters, the curious experimentation discussed in earlier chapters resulting in a sometimes chaotic but honest attempt at linking theory and practice in a new way. “Said reminds us that a first attempt by anyone, at anything, is always thought through as a balance of the most prosaic as well as more abstract (that is, openly ambitious) kind. It is always undertaken by someone operating in the here and now, but with one eye fi mly directed towards the future, for the simple reason that at this unique stage of a career (then and only then) there’s simply no looking back.”1 The purpose of such a chapter is not to define architects by certain personality traits but to uncover how those traits affect the form, theory, and practice of their architectures while illuminating the structure of such careers from turbulent, brave inceptions to the oftentimes vulgarly repetitive finale . While the lives of artists, musicians, and other famous figu es in the creative fields are examined on a micro level, architects are strangely lacking biographical records, leaving their practices as the only remnant of lives eventually defin d by the theory of others and buildings used by many. Some personalities are well documented like Frank Lloyd Wright’s women issues2 or Louis Kahn’s office behavior3 but others are thickly veiled behind 1 Steele, Brett, and Francisco González De Canales. First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s. 2 Boyle, T. Coraghessan. The Women: A Novel. New York: Viking, 2009. Print. 3 My Architect: A Son’s Journey. Prod. Nathaniel. Kahn. Dir. Nathaniel. Kahn.

A Fragile Architecture

the signature image of their work or infamous personalities. Just like with mainstream celebrities, architects are revered in academic cultures partially based on their designs but mostly based on the perceived power. Architects like Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind become reality stars in a reality fabricated in the studios of academia and the covers of magazines delivered to offices every month. This proliferation of consumable, superficial, supernormal architecture births a cycle of architects, who once experimented with absurdities and unexplored territories, attempting to find what made their last project publish-worthy, or competition-competitive. The rich and commercially failed first drawings of Zaha Hadid are forgotten in favor of sweeping Chinese malls and front-page stadium controversies. Heavy criticism falls on architects who simply provide a product, yet paradoxically, within a new realm of technology and mass media, starchitects slowly merge into the realm of production architecture no longer pushing any sort of new theory or practice forward. While academics and these specific architects continue to publish and teach, introducing jargon in titles of monographs and publications like â&#x20AC;&#x153;towards a new-,â&#x20AC;? these efforts only serve to stagnate progress within a tangible world of architecture, and mask (or fill) the increasing gap between contemporary architecture and a more timeless practice. These characters were at the inception of both, each possessing the power to create architecture, and destroy it. A man like Daniel Libeskind develops a new personality strictly in the form of his architecture, made tangible and prolific in touchable works in Denver and Berlin, but as one finds his earliest work, they peer upon a different man, not just in theory or practice, but in personality, purpose, and passion.

First work of Daniel Libeskind >

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

Frank Lloyd Wright “WRIGHT: Arrogance is something a man possesses on the surface to defend the fact that he hasn’t got the thing that he pretends to have. INTERVIEWER: Arrogance can sometimes be a shell to protect the inner man too, can it not, even though that inner man has a good deal? WRIGHT: Well, it’s a pretty brittle shell.”1 1 Mike Wallace Interviews Frank Lloyd Wright. Perf. Frank Lloyd Wright. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas At Austin. 1957.

Marshall Ford

Our father. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve distanced ourselves from the man who gave us everything. Maybe itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s because Chicago is too cold in the winter that we allow Wright to exist monumentalized by himself in hauntingly still homes, placed like designer chess pieces along the green streets of Oak Park. His Los Angeles collection, my first FLW experience, is different, distanced and disconnected from the man that made architecture live in Chicago. My grandfather taught me about Frank Lloyd Wright, asking yearly if I wanted to visit the Hollyhock House in Hollywood, bestowing his perception of the man on me, handing me the triangle scale I still use today. Heavy historical fame places Wright in a weird position amongst contemporary architects. He is more often visited by novice architectural enthusiasts through the pages of Barnes and Noble bargain books and dusty leftovers from the tiny architecture section of local, public libraries. Just beneath the surface are stories of adultery, murder, arrogance, and stoic, even heroic struggle. Architects today lust for the same level of architectural power that dismisses sin for beauty, and convinces a client purely based on name. Wright was an artist via ego and salesmanship, and an architect by trade. From time to time a house of his will go for sale somewhere deep in the United States illuminating with a spark the breadth of the manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s incredible collection of work sprinkled across Falls Church Virginia, San Luis Obispo California, and Yemassee South Carolina; projects otherwise dwelling in the shadows of the Guggenheim and Fallingwater. My fling with Wright began and ended during my time at Smith and Gill in Chicago. On my off days I traveled to Oak Park, downtown, and Hyde Park ticking the boxes next to the architectures that were only, in my methods, accessible via a 22 hour train ride from Boston. Many homes were expectedly museumified, lying somewhat vacant as moments of history

A Fragile Architecture

in otherwise regular neighborhoods of Chicago. But as I walked into the drafting room of his home and studio in Oak Park, a temple emerged that meant much more than the house, or even Frank Lloyd Wright himself. Dark, black chains hung from the ceiling, elevating beams that supported the double height, wooden space, light minutely controlled illuminating the place with spirituality and evoking his personality in the dark wood texturescape. The room, more than any other Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve experienced in my short life, was a temple to architecture, and further, the spirit and power in the ability to architecturalize and build. A temple to building and a chapel of manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most egotistical sport: architecture. Unphotographable physically, legally, and emotionally, the room was nothing groundbreaking, astounding, or unbelievable. In fact, it all made perfect sense, and the purposes of every object were thoroughly embedded in the aura of the place. Wright is the lead character on this list because he is the quintessential architectural asshole. A best selling book is written about his affairs with other women, illustrating Wright as a fictional anti-hero, dead and gone, but scattered like ashes across the United States in buildings that many students today see as dusty relics, valueless, and others that are virtually abandoned. But the moment in architecture, like entering the draft room in his home, where the architecture removes itself and we are left with the tangible essence of the person who made it is where I begin to question the unquestionable power of ego in architecture. Not strictly emotional, beautiful, or sublime, a personal architecture, a fragile one that is allowed to crack and ooze all over us in warm nectar, that is unexplainable but makes perfect sense, is the result of pure ego and the foundation to necessary architecture.

Marshall Ford

Drafting room at Frank Lloyd Wrightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Home and Studio.

A Fragile Architecture

LeCorbusier “I am naive.”1

1 Wogenscky, André. Le Corbusier’s Hands. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. p25

Marshall Ford

A self-righteous enigma; the architect’s dream caricature, with a soft spot for his mother and the reckless abandon of an orphaned child. Spiritually and physically LeCorbusier remains a comfortable and alluring mystery due to time, personality, and his crafted brand of aloofness. He was “calm and nervous, authoritarian and shy, battling and peaceful, intransigent and understanding, hard and gentle, active and contemplative, self-centered and generous, proud and modest, Cartesian and mythical, solid and emotional, clear-sighted and naive, yet free and alone.”4 More than any other character, the mystique of LeCorbusier as a person is intimately intertwined with his monumental architectural persona. Subtle cracks in the unbreakable architect shell hint at a man beneath a monochrome arrogance that is naked and social, but aloof and alone. LeCorbusier is the hero of obsession with architectural contradiction, the corporeal manifestation of the potential for an object to be one thing and also its opposite at once. He had his women, he had his vices, but over time the respect for LeCorbusier has grown to extraordinary proportions. Contradictory biographies, stories, and even his own statements, complete the image of a man defined by mystery, and memorialized in revered buildings across the globe, convoluting any possibility of really defining LeCorbusier as either a person or an architect. And we love it. Volumes are dedicated to the man who built a very select number of buildings that now define architecture as we know it today. Villa Savoye, Unité d’Habitation, Ronchamp, and Carpenter Center at Harvard are the only contemporary experiences of a man constructed as pure ego. The ability to experience an architect through the emotional impact of their work hints at the power of such an ego in architecture. Perhaps LeCorbusier’s greatest contribution to architecture was his madness, because in the end, Ronchamp is spiritual not because of its program or description or theory, but because of his architecture. 4 Wogenscky, André. Le Corbusier’s Hands. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. p5

A Fragile Architecture

The audacity to redefine the rules: to redefine the man. To bridge the gap between the metric and the imperial with art, with the human, presented in architecture. Le Corbusier speaks of himself: “One day there were postcards spread over the table under an oil lamp in his small room in Paris. The image of Michelangelo’s Capitol in Rome caught his eye. He turned another postcard blank face up and he intuitively moved it to one of the angles (right angle) on the facade of the Capitol. Suddenly, an acceptable truth became apparent: the right angle regulated the composition. That was a revelation, a certainty. The same test worked on a painting by Cezanne, but our own man did not trust his verdict and told himself: the composition of works of art is arranged according to the rules. These rules can be subtle, conscious, or ostensible methods. The can also be cliche and banal. They can also result from the creative instinct of the artist, as manifestations of an intuitive harmony, an example of which we can almost surely find in Cezanne. Michelangelo had a different nature and was prone to erudite, preconceived, deliberate lines.”5 Modulor was a set of proportions based on the height of a man devised to bridge the gap between the metric and imperial measurement systems. The man, no doubt, LeCorbusier, the purpose, no doubt, architecture.

5 Wogenscky, André. Le Corbusier’s Hands. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. p69

Marshall Ford

Modulor

A Fragile Architecture

Louis Kahn “Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”1

1 Kahn, Louis I., and Alessandra Latour. Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991.

Marshall Ford

What can I say? When we talk about the sublime, you always come up. I have a crush I guess, just because you make it so easy. I know your story: you came up slowly, architecture really came last. But then suddenly you made Salk and then you made Exeter and then there was Bangladesh. We talk about you all the time. We know it was about material, light, and weight. Everything seems so heavy but levitated by architectural magic above us, even in a high school library. For everyone else I have legitimate references, but for you I have none, only what I’ve experienced. I feel you’ve been honest to me, not hiding deeper things within more formalized structures of architectural convincing. Thank you. We all want damages; we want to have some sort of friction against our genius which we envision to stay buried forever but hope one day to be uncovered like ruins. Louis, I need to thank you, not only for inspiration, but for real intimidating architectural foundation. I feel like I’m writing the last entry for a yearbook of childhood friendship, and maybe I am. But an obituary is not a monument I wish to present. You remind me of stand up comedians but with a touch for the tangible and beautiful; the only way to express yourself, something deeper, is through the opposite, the lightness and darkness and weight in architecture laying as heavy as intangible emotions and moments. For some reason I love your Trenton Bath House the most. It frustrates me, it’s barely there, I guess like us. It’s like crying in a movie at fulfillment, within the heavy void of happiness and sadness: when she runs away, when he jumps in the river, when they say goodbye for the first time. You really know how to make architecture nothing at all and everything that matters. Sure many of us enjoy the playfulness, mystery, and exploration of architecture, but with you, we’re never left wanting anything at all, and we cannot explain it.

A Fragile Architecture

Trenton Bath House (originally Jewish Community Center) in Trenton, NJ

Marshall Ford

“...because I don’t have any historical knowledge, nor any research tendencies. I can’t look up and find other literature, I just can’t do it. And so it’s left, in a way, in a very undeveloped state, as though it were just an offering for someone else, you know to extend. It doesn’t happen, because I really say too little to make it completely understandable. That’s why I like to talk about it, because I talk about it more freely, because writing is very difficult for m , though I’ve done some...” 6

6 Kahn, “How’m I Doing, Corbusier?” 1972, in Writings, 309.

A Fragile Architecture

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe “This is the human (ethics) aspect of the issue. It is everyone’s task, and not just a minority’s, to use things for the greatest good of all. This is, I think, what we really should do with our lives.”1

1 http://www.nucleocapital.com/e/documents/MiesVanderRohe_E.pdf

Marshall Ford

Mies’ impact on the ideological movement of architecture is undeniable. He changed everything by radically normalizing the beauty of the ordinary; he owned Chicago. But the audacity! Sure, modernism was rampant, and glassy steel buildings existed in rough form, but to propose improvement on such minimal details proved to be an obsessive absurdist’s fantasy come true. But Mies’ genius, cleanliness, and detail were not his most important contribution to architecture, it was his death. For architects, death adds one more degree of separation between their subjecthood and their architecture/monument.7 Sure the signature of the architect lives on in the remainder of their built work, and for more revered subjects, in work completed years after death. But for Mies, his massive and refined ego provides a cloud-car vehicle transcending the cutting effects of mortal death on subject (Mies)/object (architecture) relationships, and cements Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe as an infinite personality intertwined within his work, rather than a mystical figure we attribute to architectural artifacts. Mies was resurrected in a 24 year-long attempt by British developer Peter Palumbo to construct his final design in London, riddled with preservation-focused lawsuits questioning the value of Mies as a signature, an artist, an architect, and a person.8 We tend to see architects at a distance from building or body itself, and even after death we covet the signature architecture of that person as a translation of personhood into a medium other than an actual person, perhaps for our own selfish, human necessity to grasp the subject of the object. Somehow Mies defies the need for that separation or distance, his architecture a pure result and tangible experience of perhaps the most infinite architectural ego in history. If God is in the details, Mies is right there with Him. 7 Hyde, Tinmothy. “Personhood.” Modernity and Crisis Lecture, November 6th 2013 8 http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/profile-builde -of-dreams-or-monuments-peterpalumbo-a-visionary-at-the-arts-council-1465222.html

A Fragile Architecture

Philip Johnson “You’re going to change the world? Well, go ahead and try. You’ll give it up at a certain point and change yourself instead.”1

1 http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0299-FEB_PHIL

Marshall Ford

Johnson is a commodity. He is oil, he is art, he is religion, he is money. Phillip Johnson is not a real person;9 as an architect he was a projection of a subjectivity, and while his style changed, his work was always signed. His mirrored monuments to God, money, and oil in Texas, California, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and across the United States describe what “a new stage in commodity fetishism might actually look like: the inability to simply look at something directly, rather than attempt to see through it.”10 Johnson’s ability to architecturalize emotional and physical distance within our own perception indicates a brilliance of control between us and things, and a grasp on the fetishized pulse of desire that turn us into a commodified collection of wants. We all secretly play God, but Johnson, the master of diversion, glassy mysticism and motivational secrecy, had nothing to hide. His Glass House to himself is the most famous home of any architectural character. While his most prominent works focus on possibilities of emotionally meditative (Rothko Chapel) and ideologically concealing (Pennzoil Place) reflection, the Glass House shields nothing. He entertained Andy Warhol at the house and obsessively expanded his collection of self-built works on the property in Connecticut over decades, including a concrete bunker of art, a diametrically opposed brick house, and a chain-link fence house, in a forgotten corner, dedicated to Frank Gehry. Johnson was a heroic egotist and an exposed man. It is a grueling and torturous duality for a person to endure, or sustain, but architects masochistically thirst for the struggle: a self-righteous religion. Johnson arguably presented the greatest ego of the deeply prideful postmodernists, and though the Glass House is more of a challenge directed at others than an actual exercise in self-exposure, he was the one to do it. Rest in peace. 9 Hyde, Tinmothy. “Personhood.” Modernity and Crisis Lecture, November 6th 2013 10 Martin, Reinhold. Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2010. Print. p122

A Fragile Architecture

Marshall Ford

“You can’t learn architecture any more than you can learn a sense of music or of painting. You shouldn’t talk about art, you should do it.”

A Fragile Architecture

Peter Zumthor “I design for the use of a building and the place and for the people who use it… the reputation for arrogance comes because when work is offered to me I look whether I can find a genuine inte est in quality. If I only find an inte est in using my name for economic reasons, or if I can see that this is a project that only deals with image and facade, of course I say no.”1

1 http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/peter-zumthor-serpentine-gallery-pavilion

Marshall Ford

I’m sorry, I know very little about you except what I hear. I hear you are easy to love and you make things that everyone wants to visit, when they get the money. You were the first Pritzker I experienced when I was in undergraduate school, even though I had seen Nouvel in Paris earlier that year. I hear about your outlandish requirements for clients to research you before they know you. I see the blobbly black blob that proposes to devour LACMA like the obviously adjacent tar pits that slowly sucked mother mammoths away from their children. I know you are selective... I know that! But even though you’ve “always said yes, or no, without looking at the money”11 you are still an arrogant man, and you’ve created an art of it. You talk like a person. I do not know you, but I know your work. You are the last person I chose for this list. You have my colleagues to thank for your inclusion, and I must offer my slightest apologies. I do think it is interesting, however, that whenever arrogance is discussed with you, the discussion focuses on family and money; the happiness of your children despite the lack of immediate funds. “‘We didn’t realise about the money, we were happy’. It’s an attitude, isn’t it? A choice.”12 That’s love, right? That’s what we all want... right? Lusting only to make good architecture and focus elsewhere on what makes us happy, which in turn, leads to the inherent discovery of good architecture. You fight the rampantly timid opinions of impossible architecture with your sublime manifestations of yourself. I know you somehow, probably through your chapel in Cologne, or the incessant praise of your baths. But for some reason I am drawn to the chapel in Sumvitg; it reminds me of home, though I’ve never been there; it feels perfectly constructed, though I’ve never felt it; it makes me miss you, though I’ve never met you. 11 http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/daily-news/peter-zumthor-my-work-is-notabout-design/8615593.article 12 IBID

A Fragile Architecture

Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg Switzerland (exterior with bell tower)

Marshall Ford

Saint Benedict Chapel, Sumvitg, Switzerland (interior)

A Fragile Architecture

Thom Mayne “Architecture with no voice – it means a society with no voice. Everyone has ego. That’s actually a nasty argument. It’s coming as a very aggressive offensive argument as ego that’s located within the architect is somehow differentiated from any other human being.”1

1 http://pard.technion.ac.il/tcii/thom-mayne-morphosis-roosevelt-island/

Marshall Ford

“The essence of development as a human being is in developing the capacity for ever more complex experience...”13 Mayne comes from a family of established California architects including Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, and Greg Lynn who each refined very specific egos, but share a familial quality of extreme experimentalism and playfulness. Maybe it’s the warm winters that provide the freedom for such men and women to play, or the detachment from the rigid historical theory of non-SciArc, East Coast schools. Regardless, LA is the architectural playground of the most recent century, and Thom is a mutual king of the castle. Morphosis leaves a satisfying everything to the imagination. Buildings like Cal Trans in LA, Cooper Union in New York, and Diamond Ranch High School are soaked in theory and formal extremism, but through a simplified and non-architecturalized lens, they are beacons of curiosity, decorated with fly ng armatures begging for exploration and strange found objects amongst twisted metal and neon lights. Thom’s buildings are mean and cold, but constructed purely out of love for the sport. For those that work at Morphosis he is like a father figure, and many of his lectures approach the three-hour mark because of his excitement about everything he has ever created. His projects are easily confused by those unfamiliar with Morphosis because of their similar aesthetics (color, material, jaggedness), but inexplicably, Morphosis’ ability to create projects that are absolutely distinguishable from each other lies in the personal dedication to each work, and the egotistical drive towards the chaotic sublime. His manufactured architectural persona is sharp, bent, glassy, and tumultuous. He is a master of buildings that make my grandmother cringe. But his architectural love is omnipresent in his architecture where one can almost see the stroke of the unapologetically ego-driven architect in the details of the experience. 13 Jencks, Charles, and Karl Kropf. Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture. Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy, 2006. p302

A Fragile Architecture

Zaha Hadid “In architecture, one has to have a tremendous will. And survival, it’s a good, really a very tough profession. And if you are, yourself, very ambitious and very demanding of your own goals and how you can improve on the work or increase the repertoire, then it is, of course, an extension of certain aspects of your personality.”1

1 “Interview with Zaha Hadid.” Interview by Becky Anderson. CNN International. Connect the World, 15 Apr. 2010. Television. Transcript.

Marshall Ford

“We went by boat, and then on a smaller one made of reeds, to visit villages in the marshes. The beauty of the landscape-where sand, water, reeds, birds, building, and people all somehow fl wed together-has never left me.”14 Zaha knew she was an architect at 11 when her and her father visited the villages of Sumer. The spirit of architecture pervaded a young girl’s memories in her home and experiences of historic architecture and modernist Iranian homes. Zaha’s ego precedes her in all architectural encounters. Her lectures around the world draw crowds of thousands. Recently a lecture at USC gained critical acclaim on social media for the overbooked auditorium that placed some students sitting near the ceiling. As the only female architect in the cast, her character is a divisive one: sharply criticized for her high demands and controversial callousness in her reactions to the impact of her buildings (500 Indian and 382 Nepalese workers have died building for the Qatar World Cup)15, but praised for her unstoppable inventiveness, “each project more audacious than the last,”16 and her ability to transcend any gender discussions in the field through an undeniable force of work. Her signature curves are the intense and steady climax of a career that spent decades without building anything. Deep in her early career, the Architectural Association’s requirement for students to learn draftsmanship harvested Zaha’s talent in beautiful drawings that hold steady as the unmovable anchor to one of the most prolific and awarded careers in architectural history. Perhaps the greatest ego of the millennium thus far, Hadid’s momentum barrels arrogantly through criticism of quality, morality, and ugliness towards the futuristically relentless and gently personal architecture that at its essence, begrudgingly cannot be dismissed simply for its meaninglessness. 14 Zaha Hadid. Biography Today, Sept, 2012, Vol.21(3), p.168 15 theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/zaha-hadid-qatar-world-cup-migrant-worker-deaths 16 Zaha Hadid. Biography Today, Sept, 2012, Vol.21(3), p.174

A Fragile Architecture

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

Peter Eisenman “My physical relations are absolutely important to me and they have nothing to do with my work necessarily. People are very important to me. My family, my students.”1

1 Peter Eisenman: “Project or Practice?” Perf. Peter Eisenman. Syracuse University School of Architecture, 2011.

Marshall Ford

Eisenman puts a lot of pressure on himself. He represents the dream of all architecture students, and the inevitable insecurity of them as well by facing the infinite paradoxical battle between the lust to become respected as an architect and the passion to influence and introduce visible and academically ingrained theoretical principles. His massive success comes at the intersection of both. He “invents architectures, is as important as his architecture, inseparable from it.”17 By embedding his theory within himself within his architecture, Eisenman somehow gains coveted respect as an architect and as a person at the same time. His ego lies in the ability to live within his own theory, and his arrogance in even attempting such a feat is tangible in his architecture, especially his deeply personal series of houses. Yet as much as I jealously yearn to dismiss Peter’s success as grounded in something other than a necessary project (or practice), the more his insistence on treating his work as a biography of himself, rather than a life size monograph of importance, illuminates an architecture that is willing to go back to its original principles. Eisenman is confounding when layered with his built work; a man that is deeply humane in his theory of architecture returning to its roots, who creates architecture that to the nonarchitect seems broken, bent, and empty. “In the case of Eisenman, first works have a way of being definit vely unfinished, as a discrete project becomes a period, threatening to absorb an entire career. This may partly be due to the fact that, regardless of medium or genre, all the projects have been conceived as texts rather than works, and the effect of perpetual delay is one of the key methods to this madness. So, despite the typically perverse helpfulness of Eisenman’s blunt numerology, House I appears neither as first nor yet complete, frustrating any attribution as origin or legacy.”18 17 Moneo, José Rafael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies In the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004. p146 18 Steele, Brett, and Francisco González De Canales. First Works: Emerging Architectural Experimentation of the 1960s & 1970s. London: Architectural Association, 2009. p157

A Fragile Architecture

Frank Gehry “Each project, I suffer like I’m starting over again in life. There’s a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.”1

1 http://nymag.com/arts/architecture/profiles/57433/index2.htm

Marshall Ford

Gehry appeared on the Simpsons on April 3rd, 2005.19 Arguably the posterchild for the term “starchitect,” Gehry is immortalized in a scene where he crumples up a piece of paper, throws it on the floo , and discovers the design for his (in)famous Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The scene still haunts him today. Often criticized for doing the same thing over and over, Gehry is a businessman and founder of a contemporary character of the love-to-hate architect, using Los Angeles, his own home, and later on, the world, as a playground for an audacious architecture of personal exploration. As a child, Gehry built imaginary houses and cities out of items he found in his father’s hardware store. He moved to California in 1949 to attend USC and dropped out of Harvard in the late 50’s. His initial success came from a series of cardboard furniture that allowed him to purchase the home he still lives in today in Santa Monica, California. His early work quietly resides beneath the surface of the unorganized noise of west Los Angeles, draped in chain-link fence, lathered in concrete, and unorthodoxly decorated with strangely placed ordinary windows and glass planes. His early playfulness hides in plain sight, while his signature ego is on display for the world at Disney Concert Hall and Guggenheim Bilbao. He is an entrepreneur and hack; a playful child and a curious curmudgeon; genius and a sincere old man who is arguably responsible for everything that architecture students crave and, at the same time, are deathly afraid of becoming. The “Bilbao Effect,” a socio-urbanistic phenomenon, is solely the responsibility of Gehry, as he dominates global landscapes with formal sweeps and technological explanations of un-theoreticized architectures. His ego expands as his packaged monuments rise, but deep within the famous forms, moments of rare discovery and adventure weave within canyons of metal, and skies of chain-link. My mom knows Frank Gehry, and so do I. 19 http://observer.com/2011/09/frank-gehry-regrets-his-guest-appearance-the-simpsons/

A Fragile Architecture

Rem Koolhaas

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I hate being an architect. I actually hate architects.â&#x20AC;?1

1 http://curbed.com/archives/2014/06/13/19-revealing-koolhaas-quotes-from-his-latest-interviews.php

Marshall Ford

The icon of icons. The super-heroic every day man who made us delusionally addicted to a delirious New York and reconsiders everything that is already considered. “No one can deny the fact that Koolhaas’s ideas have left a huge impact on our thinking. In spite of detractors, these ideas have precious little to do with self-promotion and more to do with his brilliant capacity for synthesis and attraction to all that is difficult like that Himalaya of evidence waiting to be scaled.”20 His theory borders on no theory as many of his projects add nothing new, but reorganize everything into something unheard of, yet so obvious in hindsight. He says what architects want to say in a dead language in which only he is fluent, but confounds even the greatest scholars of our time. For God’s sake, Rem inspired several books about himself, all of which attempt to decode a man who hides behind nothing. Rem is a liar, but he proves it. The indefinite two-shelf absence of SMLXL in Loeb Library at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design signals an obsession and a necessity to have him. So, what about his ego? He doesn’t even need one. He is not a rock star, he is rock music, an untouchable figure of an entire practice who is only interacted with through praise or criticism. An untrained architect by definition. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. Rem. The chant is religious, calling for an encore of mythical proportions built out of mundane familiarity, but sharp in its irony, simplicity, and arrogance. Nobody can say anything! What is there to say?! The more he is played out, the more his legend grows. OMA is the fertile soil of the promised land that birthed other architects on this list. OMA is alchemy, the fountain of youth, and El Dorado; not a real place, simply an idea that one man’s genius ego proved to exist. Do not try to fight it, ou already came too far. 20 Koolhaas, Rem, and Véronique Patteeuw. Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: What Is OMA. Rotterdam: NAi, 2003. p118

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12 13

I, wisdom, dwell together with prudence; I possess knowledge and discretion. To fear the Lord is to hate evil;

I hate pride and arrogance,

evil behavior and perverse speech.

14 15 16 17 18

Counsel and sound judgment are mine; I have insight, I have power. By me kings reign and rulers issue decrees that are just; by me princes govern, and noblesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all who rule on earth.[b] I love those who love me, and those who seek me find m . With me are riches and honor,

enduring wealth and prosperity.

My fruit is better than fine old;

what I yield surpasses choice silver.

I walk in the way of righteousness,

along the paths of justice, bestowing a rich inheritance on those who love me and making their treasuries full.

Proverbs 8:12-21

Marshall Ford

A Fragile Architecture

Marshall Ford

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Bjarke Ingels “It’s a question of what you want and not what everybody else wants. Love is about giving, not about taking! He [sic] didn’t give a shit, because he loved the girl! You shouldn’t aspire for appreciation--you should aspire to do what you want to put out in the world.”1 1 Parker, Ian. “High Rise (Bjarke Ingels Interview).” The New Yorker. Sept 10, 2012, Vol.88(27), p.76

Marshall Ford

(It will be interesting to read this again in twenty years, if it even exists.) Bjarke is the super star, the rookie, the prodigy, and in architecture that means delivering what people want, but first, making them want it. Bjarke fills lecture halls with students and practitioners salivating at the opportunity to ask that one question, make him trip, or simply legitimize endless critiques on the man’s brand, image, name, accent, and projects. Don’t get me wrong, they might all be right. But Bjarke elicits an ironic pessimism from others with his relentless optimism. He is one of the most convincing architects who ever lived. Want is everything. The power to make people want is rooted deep in the ego of the person, and arrogance is the crutch on which architecture’s seduction of want leans. Yes. Bjarke is all about a determined “Yes.” Yes is more, obviously. His self coined “pragmatic utopianism”21 placed between, or outside, the “naively utopian and the petrifyingly pragmatic” is a rigorously simple response to an era of vacuous complexity. A battle of arrogance versus arrogance, the overintellectualized versus the un-intellectualized. His first monograph is a comic book of mostly fantasy projects published in a field saturated with lengthy writing and obsession for French literary philosophy. Most of what he says is frustratingly inoffensive in a choreographed pitch of himself. “What architects should do is make the world a little bit more like our dreams, in a very practical way.”22 I cannot help but admire a refreshing pragmatism; an overproduced ego proving the necessity of such a thing in new architecture. But maybe they’re right about the one liner thing. When all a person does is play, no matter how practical, things may never get serious, and grow dangerously impersonal. But I sincerely doubt it is impersonal at all.

21 Ingels, Bjarke. Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution. Köln: Evergreen, 2010. p12 22 Parker, Ian. “High Rise.” The New Yorker. N.p., 10 Sept. 2012. Web.

A Fragile Architecture

Ego

Marshall Ford

According to Freud1: Ego: the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity. Id: operates unconsciously, accords with primary process, and impels the organism to engage in need-satsifying, tension-reducing activities, which are experienced as pleasure. Super Ego: the part of a personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind that acts as a self-critical conscience, reflecting social standards learned from parents and teachers.

1 http://www3.nd.edu/~dlapsle1/Lab/Articles%20&%20Chapters_files/Ent y%20 for%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Human%20Behavior(finalized4%20 ormatted).pdf

A Fragile Architecture

Marshall Ford

Marcel Marceau Marcel was relentlessly himself in pursuit of becoming everything else. He pushed far past his own thoughts, exaggerated his own body and performance so much that he assumed another person or thing entirely through a liberation and freedom of ego. He was incredibly self centered by definition (as a mime), in a performance of one, delving so deep into himself and his art that his work eventually became universally approachable and broadly enticing. He is the epitome of a selfless egotist, going past himself into this universal realm for both the art and himself. To push at the edge of the discipline one must indulge, and Marcel indulged completely. His mastery in all parts of the performance is not possible without the egotistical drive for perfection of craft, and the belief that he could move past the discipline in order to transcend the not-so-simple task of assuming the role of an object or person, towards a performance that embodied those things in a universally engaging way. Every moment of a Marcel Marceau act contains thousands of miniature performances only made possible through an ego-centric drive that pushes far past the discipline into the deeply personal. Impossibly, Marcel becomes incredibly loud in his silent act of transcendent performance. He is completely himself and everything else at the same moment, a parallel to the Nonindexable architecture that becomes entirely about a place and completely new at the same time; the Bilbao's and Ronchamp's. An untouchable performance from the selfless egotist, all for the art and all for himself; idiosyncratic and one masterful symphony at once. Marcel constructs worlds onstage, with only a stool and a hat, in a performance so powerful that, in the end, is absolutely silent.

A Fragile Architecture

Failure In 1999, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article for the New Yorker about physical genius, those of us who

perform highly skilled, immensely

articulate, and widely admired incredible feats of science, athleticism, and creativity simply because it feels like the right thing. His comparison between the genius of neurosurgeon Charlie Wilson, neurosurgeon and veteran navy pilot Don Quest, hockey player Wayne Gretzky, and violinist Yo-Yo Ma lands at one specific quality "He (sociologist Charles Bosk) concluded that, far more than technical skills or intelligence, what was necessary for success was the sort of attitude that Quest hasâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a practical-minded obsession with the possibility and the consequences of failure."2 Ego for the physical genius is the moment of knowing that something feels right, the rigorous pursuit of perfection in order to grasp every moment in the creative process as ones own and be familiar with even the most difficult scenarios before they even enter them. Without the freeing power of ego, microscopic procedures that repair aneurysms and win championships in seconds are impossible, restrained by a fear for failure instead of an embrace and comfortable confrontation with it. Imagination (re: Life) Egotistical freedom is not limited to the ability to make correct decisions. It embeds itself deeper into the human ability to anticipate, to read, and make a moment come alive in order to face it and move further. Imagination is far from fictional. It leads to advancement and the pursuit thereof. It provides a necessary human element to adversity, the most important 2 Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Physical Genius." The New Yorker. N.p., 2 Aug. 1999. Web.

Marshall Ford

A front page search result for "Architectural Failure" provides images of influ ntial works of architecture including Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels, and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye.

A Fragile Architecture

aspect of change in that it uncovers deeply unsettling existing information and unimaginable future possibilities. " 'A good player knows where the ball is going,' Wilson says. 'He anticipates it. He is there (a doctor friend with whom he played tennis). I just wasn't.' What Wilson is describing is a failure not of skill or of resolve but of the least understood element of physical geniusâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;imagination. For some reason, he could not make the game come alive in his mind."3 Built architecture tends to quiet the imaginative in favor of the possible. Untouchable architecture is deifi d for its ability to create the impossible, the superhuman, and the imaginative. Much of this is governed by the real world constraints from clients to cost, but the possibility of the imaginative, the possibility of life, in architecture, is very real and elucidated by the egotistic momentum of the architects we now know as legendary. Big Negative connotations with ego begin at the very large, and pinball around a cliched game involving the very rich, the very loud, the very repetitive, the very mean, and strike a chord with the term arrogant. The usual contemporary suspects almost always include Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels, or Rem Koolhaas, and filter down into lesser known practitioners and faculty at top graduate schools. Common language (gossip) at any graduate school is about other graduate schools and faculty members that many students can only characterize based on a circular gossip that roams trays, halls, and studios especially around an upcoming lecture by Liz Diller or Peter Eisenman.

3 Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Physical Genius." The New Yorker. N.p., 2 Aug. 1999. Web.

Marshall Ford

But step back for a moment. The fact is that architects are, by definition, people, an incredibly diverse set of people with one common practice splintered selectively into specialties allowing the architect to find a niche where their ego fits appropriately and can roam free, many times to an incredibly productive end, albeit, in very selective sub-fi lds like parametricism, theory of architectural eras, or professional practice. Ironically, architects with very specific ideologies are often times the most generally known or renowned. However, the architectural culture of the niche is becoming so widespread that those without a specialization may find themselves lost. An architecture without a niche, non-over-intellectualized, is always dangerous and liberating, on the edge of the discipline; exciting, groundbreaking, and silly. Most importantly, the architecture of the nonniched ego is free. According to several thesaurus' the closest synonyms to niche are hole, cubbyhole, and pigeonhole4, a frighteningly define position for the assumed leaders of a discipline defined otherwise for centuries by freedom, optimism, and human spirit. Vulnerability Ego is unmoving without vulnerability. "In order for human connection to happen, we need to be seen."5 This is not vulnerability in the sense of easily defeated or surrendered, but rather allowing oneself to be seen, to fight, and to listen. Architects often fail to listen because they only hear themselves in the words of others, while at the same time struggling to convince people to trust everything they say. Vulnerability occupies a special place in our inherent desire to satisfy those other than ourselves. As the "shell of arrogance," as Frank Lloyd Wright calls it, grows thicker, this vulnerability becomes even more important in 4 "niche." Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, Third Edition. Philip Lief Group 2009. 5 Brown, Brene. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Power of Vulnerability.â&#x20AC;? TED. TED Talks, June 2010.

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474’

1351’

1018’

2000’

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2087’

1379’

2722’

590’

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Rock It Suda by Korean architect Moon Hoon

Marshall Ford

order to allow architecture to crack. For Le Corbusier, that person was his mother. One of the greatest architects, with perhaps the greatest ego, "perhaps unknowingly, looked to satisfy more or less completely a deep maternal need."6 Freedom Ego is freedom. Arrogance, an undue level of self worth, is imprisonment, most often for architects in the form of a signature. Freedom in a persona of possibility, the belief in the untapped confidence that sinks deep for the egotistical architect, without which an architecture of any impactful magnitude is unachievable. A free architecture is neither controlled nor uncontrolled, removed from any connotations of established constraint or hesitation. Freedom through ego is the sometimes proud but inherently honest act of building, rare in contemporary practice, but indelibly possible in every human architect. Freedom is tangible, and the power of ego in architecture is greater than that of any creative field because architecture must be encountered and is a permanent moment in the human landscape. While even the most controversial or inspiring work of art can simply be walked away from (with all due disrespect for the equally genius, honest, and free creators of such objects who actually inspired me to write this), architecture cannot. There is a heavy responsibility here anchoring some architects to practicality and trend while freeing others, unleashing an egotistical necessity to build. Freedom harvests much more than untouchable architecture including the silly, obscene, nonsensical, odd, curious, naive, and beautiful, especially in the early projects of some architects. But without the liberating force of ego, architecture is destined to stand still and stay quiet, devoid of those with the ability to move forward, make it speak, and create something universal. 6 Wogenscky, AndreĚ . Le Corbusierâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hands. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. p67

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Original

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We are birthed as messy, uncontrolled, infantile life. The beginnings of everything are about the simplicity of learning how to move forward, and the complexity in discovering our unique abilities through experience. Most of our discovery is on accident, a constant pinball effect of simply attempting to control the next direction we are destined to go. Architecture is a result of who we are, everything that happens in-between now and the beginning, but we have to start somewhere, and the naive curiosity, the inherently personal results of the beginning leads to the experimentality that drives things forward. (Frank Gehry's first ork pictured above)

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Originate Beginnings are incredibly personal. The lack of editing in the experimentations of the naive and curious result in the indescribably powerful and the necessarily stupid. Untrained artists harvest the potential and an unadulterated talent for new and inherently personal work. Arrogance may build over time, but the curiosity of the beginnings of any craft, the origins, are where the definition of such craft formulates in a rough, surreal, and beautiful way. The influence of such origins are rooted at the heart of both the project and the maker as an ego trying to prove something, show something, or find something that one believes is important to someone else, fueling the egotistical drive forward towards something seemingly more powerful, but almost always lacking the inherent power found in the aggressive, emotional, experimental, exposed, and personal beginning. To find the architecture of the architect we must take a moment to look away from the final , and find the enesis. Inherent to Place Site selection processes (which comes later for this specific project) are inverted methods of placing an object within a space (space defi ed here as a literal position on this earth or another). In order for architecture to exist powerfully or necessarily, it must become so inherent to a place that it is not indexable; impossible to search for but inevitably found. The ego of the architect allows such architecture to form at the intersection of the subconsciously obvious, egotistically confident, arrogantly risky and the trained beautiful, not separate from place but completely ingrained into it. Academiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definition for integrated murders the possibility for true integration of architecture and place. Neo-integration of architecture to

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site becomes a vast and solid separation between both as the attempts to merge each other result in a first step of complete separation and definition of each, and a second step of tying both together like a rope to a dock, leaving a floating and tenuous connection between the two with plenty of slack for boredom, intellectual vacancy, and ambiguity. By defining either, both become meaningless. The literal whiteness that blinds most student projects today masks, through a violent over-saturation, any real possibility for the underlying architecture and minimal ideas to merge with those who experience it, or a greater discussion, which sadly, in the end, is usually the stated purpose of such faux-provocative projects. It is not necessary to return to the grotesque or resurrect the lovingly nasty architecture of the situationists and groups like Archigram and Archizoom, but instead to disintegrate the rigid separation between building and place and introduce the possibility of both coming together again, free from the aesthetic, ideological, and academic shackles of integration with a maximum expectation of coherence, and towards an inherent architecture. Origins Ego is central to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s foundational origins. Home becomes important because it is the source of any and all of our thinking; the most important place in the world and the center of our compiled experiences where everything comes from. Every person has a nugget of origin they will forever exist within nostalgically in memory, physically in the form of photography, objects, and medallions of relatively magnificent childhood success, and in influence of career, education, love, art, and personality. The relics of our origins saturate our immediate present and our distant futures in the diverse and unique outcomes of their influenc . Home is not only a place of firsts but of repeated, demanding, and crucially long-lasting physical, spiritual, and imaginative experiences.

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Human creativity requires the childhood experimentation that our origins hold dear in a permanent collection of ego-centric influences and practices. Our access point to many of these memories of influence is the image of home, our impression and the impressions of our childhood upon us, and the relationships with people, nature, and the city we develop over decades of turmoil. Home is everything to the human, in the best and worst sense. We started there and it means everything to us. The origin is the cathedral of pretension; it stores the most important items in one’s life as a personal collection that means very little to others. Within the context of everything the importance of childhood memory and home is exaggerated but leads to the inspiration in the creation of anything man made. It is the beginning of everything and the end of our direct personal influenc . This pretense is like architecture itself, and thus the ego of the architect is deeply embedded in the conflict between the personal importance of the architect themselves and the void of this intense personal importance for everyone else. The core of the power and vulnerability of the architect is the pretentiousness intrinsic in the will to take something the world does not care about, or is even overtly against and tell people it is important. Nobody will ever understand the architect, but they cannot escape their architecture. This project is architecture that returns to architecture’s origins and allows the architect to return to theirs. I Want What You Want Isn’t the architecture I make supposed to be what other architects want? For so long I’ve made architecture that is what I know everyone else will want, but for some reason architects have the hardest time admitting they are creating something for themselves. The most avant-garde propositions are the ones that are the most personally derived. Jonas Salk harnessed

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this personal power in proposing a cure for death, saying he could chase it away, designing an escape from succumbing to widespread and visible human vulnerability while necessarily assuming a divine position in the most scientific sense. To posses the will and confidence to chase death transcends ego, deep into the personal, and climaxes with mega-scale and untouchable effect. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m simply saying I can find the sublime. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m only saying I can please. But I am also saying it because of where I come from: first that I posses the

Jonas Salk

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The childhood home of Marshall Ford. Cayucos, CA.

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power to be original and secondly that the originality that drives my work is something others will at least like and, at most, fall for. Architecture is about the love of place, and to love, one must understand what they want. In order to nurture love, architects must assume they know how to construct love. I want what you want, obviously. Edit Editing often reconfigures the initial copy but does not eliminate the potential of originality. Though editing is connoted with destruction, the original is never destroyed, only, in some unfortunate cases, lost. The edit is necessary to define the original, the first draft, the hypothesis, and the experiment, often providing a romantic nostalgia (not sarcastic) for the piece of writing, music, or architecture that begot the final creation which we critique on its own regard. Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Kerouac’s On the Road are now sold in special editions that show the authors’ scribbling attempts at improving the original manuscripts. These edits become monumental artifacts representing the original piece of thought and proving the worth and refinement of the final copy. Rothko’s paintings in the new Harvard Art Museum are displayed next to consumable, human sized, incredibly original sketches for the 10 foot tall red and orange murals. Entire exhibitions about Ruscha, Klimt, Schiele, and Hopper travel the world displaying only “the sketches” for paintings like The Kiss and Nighthawks, offering an entirely different seduction of the “original” before the idea was churned into something much more presentable in a permanent collection. We are satisfied by our discovery of the masterpiece, but we are seduced by the sketch. We are left wanting what is next after the draft, but left alone in our inherently critical perception of the final work. An end may be satisfying, but once satisfied, we crave. Artifacts of editing are coveted for

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their intimate connection with the author while the masterpiece is cherished for its technique, idea, message, or notoriety of the author herself. But the idea itself is, by definition, intangible and untouchable. The original is as close as we get to this untouchable draft, the original manuscript, and a fragile, curious architecture. Culmination Architecture is a result of who we are: the culmination of the equation of things we have seen, done, loved, hated, and wanted. The architecture of our experience is unindexable; the tangible results of happiness, sadness, inspiration, and other untouchable qualities that create undeniable and relentless reactions to the things we experience. Architecture is essentially personal and becomes arrogantly vacant when we force it to become anything else. Regardless of conscious intent, even the most antiquated signature work from our most noted inspirations (star-chitects) are rooted in the intangibly momentous experiences of the origins of that person. Thus, powerful, nonindexable, original architecture is almost purely human, at the very least a result of the powerful, nonindexable emotional traumas and climaxes of the developing ore of a person. Our greatest architecture is original, as original as we are. As architects we are tortured by the necessity to build ourselves for others, only alleviated superficially and momentarily by a constructed arrogance that begins to define the profession as a whole the more we employ it to protect ourselves from our raw origins. Nonindexable At a certain point, the architectural ego roots itself in physical form and a deeper ideology, but such egos begin with experimentation and honesty that leads to an untouchable and personal architecture; an architecture of

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universal appeal and the naive, egotistical heart. Early on, these buildings were religious, as kings, architects, and clergy attempted to create buildings in the name of God, or gods, that would push human expression as close to divine as possible. At the same time the role of the architect became more defined, as untouchable divine architecture began to house books and art, celebrating a tangible and beautiful humanity that was advancing at a very quick pace. Contemporary nonindexable architecture is less determined by program and more birthed by those who build, both client and architect. The ideological qualities of such architecture are, therefore, inherently personal and human: completely egotistical and absolutely universal. The physical qualities of nonindexable places are at the intersection of emotional and technical. These are places that contain an undeniable power that only architecture can provide at the hands of the ego: the power to change places, alter vernaculars, and redefine the discipline, and an exposed fragility that mirrors the human that builds it. What follows is the essential index of nonindexable architectures.

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Index of Nonindexable

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Architecture

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Qualities of the Non-Indexable This is a list of qualities of non-indexable architecture, an architecture defined by a universal power in the experimental, curious, monumental, original, and untouchable. Weight - unexplainable power often comes from unexplainable weight; a feeling of heaviness or lightness (or both) created by architecture. Ancient buildings like the Parthenon or newer buildings like Nervi’s Saint Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco monolithically float unfathomable weight above the visitor, and although engineering and architectural methods to do so are not physically impossible, the experience of the place is indescribable as the user accepts their position in the monumental architectural experience. Humans love magic, levitation, and disappearing acts. When architecture achieves the impossible we are astounded and happily distraught. Kahn’s weight in the Exeter Library achieves a similar experience of awe as the lightness found in the intricate details and personal investment in the Horta House. Frank Lloyd Wright coined the simplest method of this in constant compression and decompression of space in many houses, exaggerated by low ceiling heights scaled to himself; an egotistical play of weight. Lightness and heaviness are inherently connected to experimental and groundbreaking technologies: justs as the cathedral builders of the 14th and 15th centuries played with the ability to fly toward heaven with buttresses and arches, modernists of 50’s California exploited steel in new residences that allowed for glass walls, paper thin ceilings, and delicate, untouchable lightness. Associated terms: lightness, heaviness, vastness, sweeping, lofting, vaulted, delicate, thickness, concrete, solid, unmovable, floatin

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Caixa Forum by Herzog & de Mueron

San Esteban del Rey Mission at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico

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Repetition - the oddities of simplified human behavior manifest themselves in similarly simplistic but humanistically complex ways through architecture. Symmetry and right angles are attributes of the human, but repetition is a signal of arbitrary craziness of human necessity: the need for the same, for the familiar and the possible. Similar to the arch (see next page), repetition is the basic expression of human ability to structure a building but also a strategy to make something seem large or even infinit . The contrast of a unique quality in something against a repetitive or generic one also amplifies the power of both things. The Catholic Church embedded in the center of the mosque at Cordoba, amongst the relentless repetition of endemic colored arches, creates an architectural tension that directly relates to the socio-political tension that established the building in the first place. Repetition illuminates the unique, and amplifies the large in ways that demand power from architecture. In the nonindexable, repetition is the most obvious quality but at the same time, one of the most inexplicably powerful. At a certain point repetition becomes surreal, a hyper-humanistic architectural quality where, in examples from Ă&#x2030;tienne-Louis BoullĂŠe or Lequeu, the unbuildable, unimaginable, and magnificent, butt heads with the possible, the thinkable, the large, and the sublime. Associated terms: copy, duplicate, cathedral, relentless, surreal, too much, infinit , grand, columns, pattern

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Étienne-Louis Boullée, Cathedral

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Arches - the essential structure of human design, arches are endemic to architecture as a thing. They represent a basic understanding of structure and exemplify a desire for beauty in the essence of a building. Their necessary repetition signals artificiality but results in an undeniably human result. Such a simple maneuver is solidified in millenia of architectural and human history as an integral part of human habitation. Arch over arch over arch over arch until a space becomes an impenetrable mass of a complex simplification of an overall humanification of nature. We are drawn to arches in nature, in engineering, and in building. Even the act of passing through certain archways we graduate into a new time and space, sometimes literally. Monuments and cathedrals; movie houses and tombs; the arch signifies where humans lie, gives us a context in which to place something that is â&#x20AC;&#x153;under,â&#x20AC;? and inherently supports even our heaviest loads. The arch also acts as an uncanny escape from the vertical and the perpendicular, a relief from strict and tiresome human organization and a move towards the playful, the serious, and the inexplicable (re: the sublime). The arch allows impossible thinness in columns and unimaginable spans in buildings and bridges. It is the most specific essential quality to nonindexible architecture, but when fragmented in its infinite uses, becomes one of the most widespread.

Associated terms: structure, dome, support, underneath, passing through, monument, icon, de Triomphe, stone, tunnel, Cathedral, flying buttress, systematic, St. Louis, Roman, aqueduct, bridge, span

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Basment of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome

Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, Paris

BibliothĂ¨que nationale de France, Paris

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Stature - related very closely with context, stature is how architecture presents itself among everything else. Boullee approached the sublime through monumental objects that dwarfed and overcame any context. This stature was not only achieved by size, but materiality, light, and weight, other key elements in the pursuit of nonindexable and further, the sublime. However, an inverse of stature relative to context creates moments of recognition within urban topography like Central Park in New York or the massive, abandoned automobile factories lying dormant and huge in the vacant, freshly green fi lds of Detroit. There is power in the massive, but there is the sublime in the respected: those who stand strong, and those who stand poised on their own accord, with no leaning upon shallow aesthetic arrogance. The arrogance of stature (or the stature of arrogance) powers the potential of the undeniable, the universal, and the naive. Associated terms: poise, confidenc , tall, statue, posture

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De Rotterdam by OMA

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Light - the immersive gene of architecture, light changes everything. Light creates the color of a material and signals the holiness of a place. What looms in the darkness frightens us and the light at the end of the tunnel gives us hope. Orchestration of light is one of the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most important responsibilities and one of the most basic experience-inspired qualities. Children build forts of translucent blankets and empty cardboard boxes, inevitably leaving room for their only architectural feature: a window. But the indirect and spiritual effects of light lie somewhere past architecture in a realm that very few ever approached. Many architects play with notions of natural light flooding or accenting a space, but very few achieve an experiential light architecture that leads to a deeper and more personal understanding of a place. Light cannot be explained in a photograph, further evidence that such a quality leads to the nonindexable and allows architecture to move past simply building into something more experiential and undeniable. Light also begets further architectural qualities like shadow and reflection, both playing a significant part in the depth or shallowness of a building. Furthermore, these qualities determine aspects and potentialities of temperature, material, and predicted use. Light goes much further than the amount of lux in a space, or achieving natural light in an office environment; it borders on the spiritual, for just as God is represented as a beaming light from the heavens, the architect that masters light convinces the user of the power of architecture. Associated terms: shadow, depth, refraction, translucent, transparent, mirror, heavens

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Colline Notre-Dame du Haut, Ronchamp by Le Corbusier

Beinecke Library by Gordon Bunshaft

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The Uncanny - humans are drawn to the strange because it reminds us of us. Especially in contemporary culture, imperfection is heralded as humanistic and thus humans are more poised than ever to accept the ultimately personal qualities of error. The uncanny holds a powerful position in the emotional interaction and subliminal architectural experience and, furthermore, discovery of the sublime: “The genre of the uncanny, appropriately enough for its position in romantic aesthetics, was, as Edgar Allen Poe noted, intimately bound up with, but strangely different from the grander and apparently more serious ‘sublime,’ the master category of aspiration, nostalgia, and the unattainable. Together with other subgenres of the sublime - the grotesque, the caricature, the fairy story, and the melodrama - the ghostly romance and the horror story were essentially subversive of its overarching premises and its transcendent ambitions.”1 In architecture, the uncanny presents potential for the mythical moment where architecture produces comforting familiarity and unsettling confusion or bewilderment at the same time, causing a human-centric necessity to explore for the selfish purposes of personal understanding or surrendered awe. These moments exist as point experiences of architectural elements (such as the stair in the itchingly uncanny Villa Snellman) or tremendous instances of vast confusion and intrigue. By definition uncanny means “the opposite of what is familiar” but conceptually it is far more of a fever dream, something both definitel familiar yet completely peculiar and alien at the same time.2 The term is inherently linked to the early careers of many well-known architects in their childlike architectural experiments. The honest and 1 Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992. p10 2 Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003.

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permitted mistakes in the early careers of egotistical men and women alchemized unexplainable yet engrossing results, the ones of which were built stand uncannily as moments of sublime architectural spark and productive, intelligent, arrogant naivetĂŠ. This type of architecture lies somewhere between the accidental, the personal, and the purposeful, at an intersection that calls for extreme egotism but also a courageous, inexperienced try. Almost all nonindexable architectures are uncanny, the result of the human element and the arrogance in the assuredness of the designer that something simply looks right. The uncanny is the ingredient that moves architecture forward, not as a purposeful theoretical hunting game, but as the result of something much more intrinsically human and arrogantly necessary. Associated terms: unhomely, glitch, surreal, haunting, Sand Man

Villa Snellman by Erik Gunnar Asplund; Djursholm, Sweden

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Larabanga Mosque, West Gonja District, Ghana 127

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Texture / Material - experimental materiality is returning to something more tangibly human in texture and age. A lust away from the white and ambiguous materials of the forcibly experimental late career architect. A heavy texture that floats or a light texture weighing tons gives permanence and allure to architecture; the lure of impossibility in the impossibly light or the impossibly heavy. But there is something about the unusual materials of early Frank Gehry or OMA projects that embed a deep quality of design in the fabric of the building. Sweeping chain-link fence and massive wood logs define the first tries of architects like Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, and highlight the risky confidence of the young, powerful architect. As time wears on, the signature work becomes heavy on the legacy of these people, and turns into the best selling product, weakening the power of unusual, progressive textures that inevitably disgust and inspire so many regular people. Timeless materiality in ancient structures that still stand today return as not only trendy, but reasonable construction options in an era of overengineering and arrogant architectural agendas that leave no room for the human element of avant-garde design. Herzog & de Mueronâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Caixa Forum in Spain incorporates elements of surrounding masonry in a museum that weighs as heavily as the rest of the city, but somehow floats above the ground plane with ease, accented by the softness of one of the world's most famous green walls. Louis Kahnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s definit ve concrete solidifies his architecture as timeless and monumental, within contexts that are as gentle as seaside cliffs and snowy educational campuses; a brave attempt, anchored by a growing ego, to find the exact right and undeniable architecture, a perfectly and untouchably obvious architectural solution to very specific moments in time, space, and age.

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Nature provides the architect with an infinite library of materials defined and designed by time, chemistry, weather, and disaster. Human objects in harsh natural conditions transform over time into something untouchable, but once harnessed into architecture add a new and untested dimension. The calcified concretes, rusted stone, and overgrown plasters found in the mazes of above-ground crypts and not-too-ancient ruins construct before our eyes new architectures within the worlds of forgotten ones. The permanence and sombre infinity of such materials are ripe, tangible qualities exhibiting the roughness of age that new architecture avoids in a circular search for the fountain of architectural newness and youth. Light patinas of rust on the moss covered concrete floors of abandoned factories no longer only fascinate urban wanderers and coked out squatters in the factories of lost America, but are attempted in kitchens and bathrooms of high rise penthouses in Manhattan, destined to fail in cliched installation attempts at something tactile and undeniably, unmistakably human. For architecture to emotionally grip it must be allowed to wear, rust, crumble, and stand on its own as a testament and memorial to those who made it and those who are available enough to love it.

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Curdled Chaos Plaster what seems like a horror vacui of seashells and chilled molten lava, the hints of rust and reds calm the organic redundancy of chaos

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Imminent Storm Stone an obvious name for an undefina le material... not stone nor concrete, it is an aggressive amalgamation of blacks and whites formed from the chemical processes of time

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Chipped Hurricane Paint too many coats have allowed the weather to show its age forming a visible depth between the edges of lighter, shallower remnants

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Forgotten Football Ground where childhood games were played in long grass and weeds, the soil has dried and become cracked after too many kitschy flea mar ets

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Obliteration Rust an unstoppable patina, consuming any notion of man-made, in a natural devouring of the unsure nature of human aggregated, gray material

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Rose Stone a light, almost concrete stone hints at a man made quality, melancholy and optimistic, but with a natural softness, accented by a patina attracting local, silent wildlife

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Cosmic Corporeality human by design, but otherworldly in result, this slate of stone has nothing to prove, but any minor interaction with the outside (inside) world leaves a permanent impression

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Hidden Smokecrete time and wear lead to the reveal of one of the more delicate materials as the blinding white chips away from the original texture

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XXX the human markings indicating death, life, and religion are faded, rusted remainders of solitary moments in the lifetime of an infinit , rough, and stalwart texture

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Arrogant Gray Brick preaching its own authenticity, this brick stays stubbornly as the violence of weather erodes its protective coat of harder materials

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Burnt Fault Shale a stone that outlasts and outgrows its proportions, living occurrences rot away at the pure flatness o the surface, cracking and charring elegance into tactility and humility

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Busterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Feelings black and white film holds a certain character and nostalgia that masks the more intimate emotions of its actors that is discovered through more tangential means of this material

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126 Pantheon - Apollodorus of Damascus - Rome, Italy 1236 Cathedral of Córdoba - multiple architects - Cordoba, Spain 1248 Sainte Chapelle - Peter of Montereau - Paris, France 13th and 14th Century - Rouen Cathedral - Rouen, France 14th Century - Wells Cathedral (main facade) - multiple architects - Wells, England 1321 Chora Church - Istanbul, Turkey 1332 Orbelian’s Caravanserai - Prince Chesar Orbelian - Vayots Dzor, Armenia 1370 Santa Maria sopra Minerva - Carlo Maderno - Rome, Italy 1377 Ulm Minster - multiple architects - Paris, France 15th Century - Ksar Ouled Soltane - unknown architect - Tataouine, Tunisia 1421 Larabanga Mosque - Islamic trader Ayuba - West Gonja District - Larabanga, Ghana 1460 Synagogue of Tomar -“someone of Moorish in training”1 - Tomar, Portugal 1500 Lady Chapel, Gloucester Cathedral - Thomas de Cambridge - Gloucester, England 1629 San Estevan del Rey Mission Church - unknown architect - Acoma Pueblo NM 1646 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane - Francesco Borromini - Rome, Italy 1850 Bibliotheque Sainte-Geneviève - Henri Labroustev - Paris, France 1867 Bibliotheque Nationale (France) - Henri Labrouste - Paris, France 1882 Sagrada Familia - Antoni Gaudi - Barcelona, Spain 1889 Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio - Frank Lloyd Wright - Oak Park, IL 1894 Hotel Tassel - Victor Horta - Brussels, Belgium 1901 Victor Horta House - Victor Horta - Brussels, Belgium 1904 Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmarte - Anatole de Baudot - Paris, France 1909 Glasgow School of Art - Charles Rennie Mackintosh - Glasgow, Scotland 1910 Casa Mila - Antoni Gaudi - Barcelona, Spain 1918 Villa Snellman - Eric Gunnar Asplund - Djorsholm, Sweden 1919 Großes Schauspielhaus - Hans Poelzig - Berlin, Germany 1924 Church of Notre Dame du Raincy - Auguste Perret - Le Raincy, France 1950 Johnson Wax Headquarters Carport - Frank Lloyd Wright - Racine, WI 1954 Notre Dame du Haut - LeCorbusier - Ronchamp, France 1956 Crown Hall - Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - Chicago, IL 1957 Inland Steel Building - SOM - Chicago, IL 1960 Amsterdam Orphanage - Aldo Van Eyck - Amsterdam, The Netherlands 1960 Salk Institute - Louis Kahn - La Jolla, CA 1962 TWA Terminal - Eero Saarinen - New York, NY 1962 Palace of Assembly - Le Corbusier - Chandigarh, India 1963 Beinecke Library - Gordon Bunshaft - New Haven, CT 1963 Sheats Goldstein House - John Lautner - Los Angeles, CA 1966 Church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banley - Virilio & Parent - Nevers, France 1971 St Nicolas' Church - Walter Forderer - Hérémence, Switzerland 1971 Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption - Pier Luigi Nervi - San Francisco, CA 1974 National Assembly Building - Louis Kahn - Dhaka, Bangladesh 1976 Wotruba Church - Fritz Wotruba - Vienna, Austria 1978 Brion Cemetery - Carlo Scarpa - Treviso, Italy 1988 Saint Benedict Chapel - Peter Zumthor - Sumvitg, Switzerland 1996 Therme Vals - Peter Zumthor - Vals, Switzerland 1997 Guggenheim Museum - Frank Gehry - Bilbao, Spain 2013 De Rotterdam - OMA - Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1 Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning. New York, NY: Architectural History Foundation, 1985. Print.

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First Amendment to Index dated March 1st 2015: 1327 Djinguereber Mosque - Abu Ishap Es-Saheli Altouwaidjin - Timbuktu 1931 Villa Savoye - Le Corbusier - Poissy, France 1953 Muuratsalo Experimental House - Alvar Aalto - Säynätsalo, Finland 1966 Saint Petri Church - Sigurd Lewerentz - Klippan, Sweden 1977 Pompidou - Rogers and Piano - Paris, France 1997 Chapel of St Ignatius - Steven Holl - Seattle, WA, USA 2000 City Hall of Utrecht - Enric Miralles - Utrecht, Netherlands Second Amendment to Index dated April 1st 2015 (The Steiner-Plečnik Amendment): 1914 Das Heizhaus - Rudolf Steiner - Dornach, Switzerland 1916 Haus Duldeck - Rudolf Steiner - Dornach, Switzerland 1919 First Goetheanum - Rudolph Steiner - Dornach, Switzerland 1928 Second Goetheanum - Rudolf Steiner - Dornach Switzerland 1931 Bull Staircase - Jože Plečnik - Prague, CZ 1932 Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord - Jože Plečnik - Prague, CZ 1939 Church of Saint Michael - Jože Plečnik - Črna Vas, Slovenia 1956 Križanke Summer Theatre - Jože Plečnik - Ljubljana, Slovenia

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The Pantheon 126 (AD) Rome, Italy by Apollodorus of Damascus

Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba 1236 Córdoba, Spain by Hernán Ruiz the Younger, Juan de Ochoa Praves, Hernan Ruiz III, Hernan Ruiz the Elder, and Diego de Ochoa Praves Sainte-Chapelle 1248 Paris, France by Peter of Montereau

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Rouen Cathedral 13th and 14th Century Rouen, France by Unknown *Claude Monet painted a series of Rouen Cathedral in the late 19th century capturing the changes in the facade at different times of the day and year, which, in impressionist fashion, also contribute to deteriorations of the facade into almost unrecognizable, but essential, moments of the cathedral.

Wells Cathedral 14th Century Wells, Somerset, England by William Joy, William Wynford, Elias of Dereham

Chora Church 1321 Istanbul, Turkey by Unknown

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Orbelian’s Caravanserai 1332 Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia by Prince Chesar Orbelian

Santa Maria sopra Minerva 1370 Rome, Italy by Fra Sisto Fiorentino, Fra Ristoro da Campi, Carlo Maderno

Ulm Minster 1377-1420 Paris, France by Konrad Heinzelmann, Matthäus Böblinger, Burkhart Engelberg

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Ksar Ouled Soltane 15th Century Tataouine District, southern Tunisia by Unknown *Portrayed in Star Wars Episode 1 as the slave quarters of Mos Espa.

Larabanga Mosque 1421 West Gonja District, Ghana by an Islamic trader named Ayuba

Synagogue of Tomar 1460 (est) Tomar, Portugal by someone of Moorish background and training

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Gloucester Cathedral (and Lady Chapel) 1089â&#x20AC;&#x201C;1499 Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England by Thomas de Cambridge and others

San Estevan del Rey Mission Church 1629 - 1641 Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico by unknown *Sometimes cited as first European influenced architecture in the United States.

San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane 1638 Rome, Italy by Francesco Borromini *Discussed heavily in higher education architecture schools primarily for its dome of intersecting and seemingly parametrically considered ellipsoid forms. **In the basement, Borromini designed a crypt for himself that takes on a much different aura than the main church designed with a surreal undulating cornice lit like a dream.

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Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 1850 Paris, France by Henri Labrouste

Bibliothèque nationale de France 1868 Paris, France by Henri Labrouste *Labrouste’s two libraries on this list deviate slightly from the normal unindexable in that they are much thinner in stature. However, their place is solidified by the incredible and delicate use of familiar materials and forms in holy ways. They are also, ironically in that regard, the first examples on the list (besides Ksar Ouled Soltane) that are not religious in architectural intent.

Sagrada Familia 1882 (started) Barcelona, Spain by Antoni Gaudi *The church remains incomplete today with an estimated completion date in the 2020’s.

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Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio 1889 Oak Park, IL, USA by Frank Lloyd Wright *See Frank Lloyd Wrightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s piece in the Character chapter of this book for an original look at the studio space, seen in the image here. **The first personal home on the list, a visit to the studio is an undeniable exploration of the man himself. ***Puzzles, postcards, and other souvenirs are available in the gift shop.

Hotel Tassel 1893 Brussels, Belgium by Victor Horta *Not to be confused with Hortaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home and studio (the next entry in this index), this staircase is from Hotel Tassel, unlike many Google searches suggest.

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Victor Horta House 1898 Brussels, Belgium by Victor Horta *Formerly Maison & Atelier Horta

Church of Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre 1904 Paris, France by Anatole de Baudot

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Glasgow School of Art 1897-1909 Glasgow, Scotland by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

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*The indisputable masterpiece of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the school is essentially styleless, but an immaculate expression of Mackintoshâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s willingness to explore, steal, and lay a heavy hand on the design of everything architecture entails. The building feels like a shipwrecking rock on a cold hill in central Glasgow, but once inside everything is alive with a certain lightness between the stones, the climax of which is the sublime, intimate, dark wood library. Unfortunately the library was destroyed in a fi e in 2014.

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Casa Milà 1910 Barcelona, Spain by Antoni Gaudi *Gaudi’s expressionism, grounded in a stated surrealism is almost out of control in many of his works, but Mila is an icon of personal architecture freedom. Villa Snellman 1918 Djursholm, Sweden by Erik Gunnar Asplund *The staircase is everything, and this, in turn, makes the rest of the house everything else. Twisted.

Großes Schauspielhaus 1919 Berlin, Germany by Hans Poelzig *After indexing the theater as a work of degenerate art (Entartete Kunst) they installed a hung ceiling to hide the dripping ceiling.¹ *Demolished in 1988

1 Dawson, Layla (May 2008). "Prolific Poelzig". The Architectural Review. CCXXIII (1335): 96–97 154

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Ă&#x2030;glise Notre-Dame du Raincy 1923 Le Raincy, France by Auguste Perret

Johnson Wax Headquarters (carport) 1939 Racine, Wisconsin, USA by Frank Lloyd Wright *The space between the famous tower and the famous offic building is fantastically silent and humbly deafening. Notre Dame du Haut 1955 Ronchamp, France by Le Corbusier *The church is Le Corbusier's finest example of non-architecture, and not the Rem Koolhaas type.

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Crown Hall 1956 Chicago, Illinois, USA by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe *The lightness achieved for the tons of glass and steel on his campus in Chicago makes crown hall silently stand out in a campus of black and clear modernism. Inland Steel Building 1957 Chicago, Illinois, USA by SOM (Walter Netsch and Bruce Graham) *One of only two towers in th index (and Rem's tower is barely a tower), Inland Steel signifies the beginning of corporate architecture but also the dream such architecture was built upon, guided by commercialism and wealth, as much as Sanint Chapelle is led by God, the strange, aquamarine, solid result of infantile SOM make it stand monumental in a city of careless giants.

Amsterdam Orphanage 1960 Amsterdam, Netherlands by Aldo Van Eyck

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Salk Institute for Biological Studies 1959-1966 La Jolla. California, USA by Louis Kahn

TWA Terminal 1959-1966 New York. New York, USA by Eero Saarinen *An iconic architecturalization of the excitement of flight, grounded in timeless sweeps of concrete and futuristic portals to the airport outside. Unfortunately it was closed for decades until it reopened in 2008. Palace of Assembly 1963 Chandigarh, India by Le Corbusier

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Beinecke Library 1963 New Haven, Connecticut, USA by Gordon Bunshaft *The interior and exterior are incessantly linked while remaining completely separate experiences. The exterior is a monumental, stangely gentle brutalism while the interior is glowing and dusty in a famous translucent marble haze.

Sheats Goldstein Residence 1963 Los Angeles, California, USA by John Lautner

Sainte Bernadette du Banlay 1966 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France by Claude Parent

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St-Nicolas' Church 1971 Hérémence, Switzerland by Walter Förderer

Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption 1971 San Francisco, California, USA by Pier Luigi Nervi *Not unassuming from the outside, Saint Mary's sits (strangely) oft ignored atop a hill in a residential neighborhood of San Francisco. Once inside, the power of Nervi's massive and floating roof structure is infinitely changing, and unphotographable. National Assembly Building 1982 Dhaka, Bangladesh by Louis Kahn *A monument, built as a monument, by the silent ego that knew how and when to build monuments.

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Kirche Zur Heiligsten Dreifaltigkeit (or Wotruba Church) 1976 Vienna, Austria by Fritz Wotruba *I am most afraid to index this building because I think Wotruba knew exactly what he was doing. Brion Cemetery 1978 Treviso, Italy by Carlo Scarpa

Saint Benedict Chapel 1988 Sumvitg, Switzerland by Peter Zumthor *Unlike the more cinematic Bruder Klaus Field Chapel by a more recent Zumthor, Saint Benedict achieves architecture "that goes far beyond form and construction.â&#x20AC;?Â˛ 2 http://www.archdaily.com/106352/bruder-klaus-field-chapel-peter-zumthor/ 160

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Thermal Vals 1996 Vals, Switzerland by Peter Zumthor

Guggenheim Museum 1997 Bilbao, Spain by Frank Gehry

De Rotterdam 2013 Rotterdam, Netherlands by OMA *Designed in 1998, and finally completed 15 years later, De Rotterdam is almost nothing. Rem is at his finest reference collage moment in a project that beams like a citadel over Rotterdam that, when experienced from the one moment at the tip of Ben Van Berkels bridge, is utterly, and vastly, just, there.

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Djinguereber Mosque 1327 Timbuktu, Mali by Abu Ishap Es-Saheli Altouwaidjin *Another example (like Larabanga) of an almost architect-less piece of human building. However, an architect was commissioned. Villa Savoye 1931 Poissy, France by Le Corbusier *An example of Le Corbusier's inability to remain strictly disciplinary. Muuratsalo Experimental House 1953 SĂ¤ynĂ¤tsalo, Finland by Alvar Aalto *Aalto's aim was to create a kind of laboratory which would at the same time be combined with a playful approach. (from alvaraalto.fi Saint Petri Church 1966 Klippan, Sweden by Sigurd Lewerentz

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Pompidou Center 1977 Paris, France by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano

Igualada Cemetery 1994 near Barcelona, Spain by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos *Miralles proposed to "put the dead where the earth finishe ."

Chapel of St Ignatius 1997 Seattle, Washington, USA by Steven Holl

Utrecht Town Hall 2000 Utrecht, Netherlands by Enric Miralles

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Das Heizhaus 1914 Dornach, Switzerland by Rudolf Steiner *The chimney hovers in a strange limbo between brutalist and monumental; too joyful for one and too nonsensical for the other.

Haus Duldeck 1916 Dornach, Switzerland by Rudolf Steiner

First Goetheanum 1919 Dornach, Switzerland by Rudolf Steiner *Destroyed in an arson fi e a few years after construction.

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Second Goetheanum 1928 Dornach, Switzerland by Rudolf Steiner *The idea of the second Goetheanum begs the question of quality in originality. Is the second better than the first? More experimental? The interiors are rigorous and refined, a sort of maturity in freedom seen birthed in projects like Das Heizhaus.

Steiner's Anthroposophical Society headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland where all buildings in this index are located.

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Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord 1932; Prague, CZX; by Jože Plečnik

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Bull Staircase 1931 Prague, CZX by Jože Plečnik *A staircase leading from street to garden, an architecture specifi , weird, and uncanny. Church of Saint Michael 1939 Črna Vas, Slovenia by Jože Plečnik

Križanke Summer Theatre 1956 Ljubljana, Slovenia by Jože Plečnik

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Art

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Mark Rothko. Black, Red and Black.

A work of art is not a living thing as it walks or runs, but the making of a life, that which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finger , to some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is; for some how transcendent it is. Like the fifth symphony it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve heard it once, and you look for it, and though you know it you must hear it again; though you know it you must see it again. Truly a work of art is one that tells us that nature cannot make what man can make. - Louis Kahn

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Of course when we consider art we must also consider context, which it turn leads into further discussions of what role a piece of art plays in our experience of the world, of the art (or architecture) itself, and of ourselves as people. The placement of replicas or mimicries in new contexts elucidate the possibilities of a multitude of experiences for a single thing stemming from the emotion of one. The architectural object is no different.

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Horror Vacui Defined by Webster’s dictionary as “the horror of empty spaces”1 horror vacui in the world of art means filling the entire surface of a space or piece of art with detail. For the purposes of the architect as a practitioner, the term is not only applied to the aesthetic but to the ideological, a pressure to fill any perceptible void with filler meaning or purpose. The result is overwhelming, of course, but not in a finessed way. Instead the fat encountered in the between spaces of contemporary architecture reads as the heaviest form of nothing, weighing down the lightness of idea, craft, or even pedagogy in a manic scramble to leave no gap unfilled. The sublime is impossible in contemporary architectural theory and practice because, by definition, it requires a level of implicit inexplicableness and a satisfying lure of some parts left unexplained. The Difference Between Modern Art and This Subconscious creation and powerful critique of self and culture rules much of modern art. This however, is at the same time subconsciously performed and consciously purposeful. In order to follow the untrained artist and remain curious one must retain an inherently human naiveté while accumulating their acquired expertise fueled by a necessary arrogance. The differences between this and modern art are subtle but powerful, and the result cannot be walked away from. In fact, the most obviously powerful architecture is impossible to walk away from. It does not necessarily lure one towards it, but it becomes inescapable no matter how inexplicable or raw; a pure level of appeal on a universal level.

1 Webster’s Dictionary, Thesaurus, & Atlas: 2014 Edition. S.l.: Standard Intl Media, 2014

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We Owe Modern Art It has given architects so many projects and reasons for trying. MOMA's are responsible for a large contribution to the current competition culture architect's continue to slowly sink into. Architects are confused whether to thank modern art for the opportunities it awards them or to shun it for the saturation of similar projects vying to become the next Bilbao in cities where Guggenheim equivalents already fight for domination. Regardless, in simple terms, modern art allows architects to play and gives them a reason to do so. Both inspirational and detrimental to the practice, modern art convinces certain fi ms to keep going, and man, do some people love the results. So here's to you, modern art, for inspiring an entire age of architects to build for you, build around you, and really, really, really try to build like you. Thank you and I'm sorry. We Need To Break Up With Modern Art It's not them it's us. Really, it is. The architect's obsession, albeit honest, is mirroring the deeper desire to continue working on a discipline that has nothing to complete. The hypocrisy in pursuing an art like architecture in the intuitive way Pollock or Jasper Johns did, while grasping for respect through the cliched, diagrammatic, technical assault on the common man that is the contemporary published monograph, diminishes any inherent value that architecture has. It is a process of dealing in an inflated currency loaned on the back of stalled pedagogical progress and confused disciplinary practice. Pure talent is overrun by an arrogance that even the arrogant themselves cannot believe in. Architect's need to stop trying so hard to convince everyone of everything. Sometimes, the inability to convince the most convicted, to leave a part out that must be found personally or otherwise, is the most powerful moment in architecture. "I can't explain it,

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for some reason I just love him. He's the one." If only architecture could be so convincing, maybe we would find a future ther . Paul Thomas Anderson “This is it, I’ve been searching for something that I didn’t even know I was after.”2 Anderson’s talent is in his ability to lose people intellectually and romantically by providing a deliciously filling and fragmented narrative for those willing to experience the films as he intends or unintends “It was like cooking a pretty good dish and at the last minute just panicking and just thinking I gotta add some more shit on top of this.”3 He is a master in the art of satisfying confusion, torturous obscurity, and gratifying moments of ecstatic clarity. His films are as much an experiment in finding how to must express whatever he needs to express within the context of an overall story (some people argue if there is even a story), as an experiment in film-making itself. He steps outside the discipline of film in order to dive straight into his personal will to create, and through such an honest expression of personal ability and necessity creates some of the most remarkable and debated films in contemporary cinema. Measured in terms of profit and cult status, cinema often avoids, at all costs, the experimental, at least cinema that is concerned with business. Directors like Anderson are undeniably egotistical in their will to push forward such film into the irises of the layman, but incredibly generous in their presentation of artifacts that move the art forward necessarily. The power of freshness is always appreciated but all too rarely discovered, and even less often constructed in a form that is universally approachable yet individually touching. 2 Anderson, Paul T. "Episode 565 - Paul Thomas Anderson." Interview by Marc Maron. Audio blog post. WTF with Marc Maron. N.p., 5 Jan. 2015. 3 IBID

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Rothko This is a short chapter because I run the risk of becoming like so many other architects who lust to, whether intentionally or not, become modern artists, impressionists, and Pollock's. I do, don't get me wrong. I guess the need for mastership is inherent to human will embedded somewhere deep in the ego, but architects are not modern artists, they are builders and sculptors, and thus architecture is a separate discipline from the craft of art, especially that of the modern, because it must please on some level in order for it to actually exist, whereas art is completely free to do as it pleases; to hide, to shout, to listen, to fail, to copy. This is also a personal chapter because Rothko does something with his abstract paintings that I, satisfyingly, cannot touch, like many of the architectures listed in the Index of the Nonindexable. At the risk of placing myself in the position of an infantile art critic, he seems to move beyond the pure expressionist motions of other modern artists of the same contemporary stature, towards a more personal and rigorous abstraction of simple colors and complex forms. It seems personal, courteous, and extremely experimental with pure purpose. The arrogance of such art is untouchable, it illuminates as brilliance and we forgive trustingly. Rothko writes of the place of modern art within the human necessity to transcend the mundane and painfully normal: "We might say firs that, fundamentally, it is the modern artist's identification with the intellectual structure of the age to look at nature in that particular way that necessitates tearing it apart in order to rebuild. Gone is the a priori unity, and he can no more accept the old as a basis of development than can any other field o thought."4 4 Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print.

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Rothko in his East Hampton Studio, 1964 (National Portrain Gallery, Smithsonian)

Jackson Pollock in his East Hampton Studio

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First Expressions Human need for permanence within an infinitely changing existence began around the moments we were defined as humans. The creative act is deeply linked to the act of simply existing as human, and as seen in prehistoric paintings in caves like Lascaux in France (above), the results of such needs are purely impressionistic, obviously non-photorealistic, and generally depictions of everyday life.5 But the unpracticed nature of the paintings recall the basic human ability to express oneself, if necessary, and reveal the power in the spartan and honed abilities of the master craftsman (or the untrained artist), often forgone in architecture in favor for something more aggressively inexplicable like hyper-techno-theory, or something emptily diagrammatic or simple that quashes space allowing for a personal impression or a universal sublime. In danger of sounding nostalgic I will only say one more thing. The simplicity of initial human 5 Capelo, Holly (July 2010). "Symbols from the Sky: Heavenly messages from the depths of prehistory may be encoded on the walls of caves throughout Europe.". Seed Magazine.

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art only illuminates the power of untrained results. First expressions of a creative species remind us that the most permanent impressions we make are not specifically inexplicable or completely definable; those impressions are personal, inherent, and necessary, taking the shape of what we know we must create with the exact tools we know we must use. The potential for power in architecture lies directly in our hands and the human-ego-centric necessity to make. Inherent Impressions Human imperfection illuminates in the greatest artworks of recent eras in untouchable yet relatable moments. The impressionists, cubists, and dadaists, never claimed talent, but instead, insisted on their ability to push forward with a discipline that stagnates as often as it thrives. They found beauty in the universal appeal of human impression of surrounding environments; the personal, selfish, egotistical visions of an otherwise normal world. The unsettling, the uncanny, and the surreal are moments

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Van Gogh's "Vincent's Bedroom in Arles"

of human experience that lie just outside our familiarity with surrounding worlds, or intimate, personal worlds. The ability to see something from a completely new perspective, especially the things we are most familiar with, is the basis of visionary power, embedded in the ability to create something completely new out of necessity from the objects we acquire through experience with the craft we hone as a personal, unavoidable passion. We must, therefore we do; in painting, in music, in writing, and in architecture. The power of the beautiful lies somewhere between undeniable aesthetic transfixion and impenetrable personal craft. Somewhere in there is the arrogance to assume that one has the ability for both, but the ones who can do it are not taking risks. It is an authenticity that cannot be faked.

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Blog Architecture traded paper for pixels in the early 21st century. Unbuilt work teetered on the edge of paper architecture and digital fantasy as architecture melted together with art in an amalgamation of beautiful imagery saturated with hues of white, fli kering in an arena that no longer branded itself as either academic or professional. The artist was the architect and the architect, the artist, in this newly defined stratosphere of free and relatively anonymous creativity that soon attracted some of the greatest architectural(?) minds of contemporary generations. Anonymity granted in the realm of blogspace is almost anti-egotistical. Providing creative goods on the open market seems to lack any signs of arrogant displays of worth or ability until the source of the ambiguously internet-ized objects reveals itself electronically pointing to a standard-issue architectural website collection of newly graduated grad student work, too proud to commit (or advertise) their affiliation with the wrong architecture fi m, harboring a silent horror of association to a prefab house found in Dwell! Blogs allow the user of architecture to filte , in their own whimsical way, their fl vor of context-less white-space; the epitome of the contemporary architectural physical model. Internet architecture is both democratic and utopian while suffering from crises of legitimacy, use, authenticity, and purpose. Not in an attempt to legitimize architecture fi ms that actually build over those who do not, but when Lebbeus Woods or Herzog & de Mueron are gridded alongside undergraduate projects from the more talented schools, alongside Ruscha's later collages, we no longer look for defi ition (or satisfied pixelation) to the blurred lines between art, value, and architecture, we squint to find any remaining possibilities an authentic architecture has on the actual built landscape. The incredibly influential and the vacantly

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beautiful struggle to share the exact same #hashtagged stage.

Representation

is rampant, and although fast-

food consumption of the more important works of architectural history with the promising images of academic participants offers moments of

INSPIRATION

gratification, or consolation, when the catalog of contemporary architecture is organized by aesthetic

similarities, similarities

that are becoming more and more widespread and specifi , the

pretty

definition of the discipline fades to something unorganized, feeble, , and, eventually, almost completely

blank. Maybe everything is just being represented out of

scale.

Maybe all

work deserves the same stage in an age of dueling equality and anonymity. And I guess, in the end, the danger of giving everyone such a chance, is

everyone gets a chance. that

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Physical models from various blogs including IS Arch, Socks Studio, & Lebbeus Woods.

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Images, paintings, and illustrations from various blogs including IS Arch, Drawing Architecture, and Socks Studio.

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Music Categorization of any art form makes stepping away from one and towards another type easy, and all music, for whatever reason, is intrinsically linked to its genre and thus directly embodied in a certain genre of people as well, and vice versa. We link places to their sounds as the characteristic richness of a place is largely defined by how we hear it, and furthermore, the imagery of where those sounds come from. Las Vegas sounds like Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Louisiana and Mississippi sound like rusty blues, epitomized by a porch stage deep in the delta. Place is tied to people and people are tied to sounds, the most democratic form of tangible artistic expression. Musicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s originality transcends any context of time. Experimentalism of contemporary electronic music artists mirrors the process of creation of jazz and blues and rock but fails to find its roots in the people at the helm of sound. Deeply rooted, human reaction towards something that creates an outward musical expression is at the heart and core of a childlike curiosity and unimpeded, uninhibited passion towards putting something out there that needs to be put out there. The arrogance of the musician is different than the arrogance of the original musician: the arrogant musician finds what sounds good to others and continues forward; the original musician finds what he wants to say and says it the only way he knows how. He speaks with his instrument, he performs with his emotion, and his stage is the porch, the street, and the corner of the bar, not yet trained through experience for the stages of Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, and perhaps never ready. This sort of creation is completely egotistical, but undeniably universal. It presents something that cannot be walked away from in its untrained honesty. Beginnings are embraced and admired as the roots of creation, the beginning of a sound, and a pure expression of the fragile person who finds exactly how to say what they must say.

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American Delta blues musician, sculptor, and gravedigger James â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sonâ&#x20AC;? Thomas with clay heads on his porch in Mississippi.

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Nonmodern

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REX's "obvious ziggurat" response for renovation of Five Manhattan West.ยบ

The immediate era of architecture is defined by its deafeningly disingenuous attempts to be something, in an era opposite of that when architects were driven by the necessity to build. The discipline finds itself lost in noise of an age of arrogant diagrammatic definit veness, computerized progressive rationalism, and tenuously eager attempts to find what has gone missing for more than two decades. We are deep in the age of the Nonmodern.

0 http://www.archdaily.com/475334/rex-unveils-details-of-five-manhattan-west-development/

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Rendering/collage of design for MoMA "Expansion" from Diller Scofidio Renf o

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Rewind There is no longer a discipline to step away from, architects are on an infinite vacation from the profession they attempt to redefine through too many progressions sideways. It is a new era of non-architecture, a step past designing nothing like Diller Scofidio's blur building or the multitude of mirrored projects up in trees and parking lots in Detroit, towards an architecture strictly defined by its non-definition, a diagrammatic brand of pre-packaged marketing tools used to gain capital in exchange for buildings grounded in nothing but ideas and discomforting conviction. Not that money destroys architecture, in fact, it supports it completely, or at least the potential of it, but architects are muting, misplacing, and encrypting that potential in simplicity and confused efforts towards something definit vely "forward thinking" or "paradigm shifting." An anxiety forms amongst those especially in academia to prove something again. Architecture, in the end, is about establishing something; making something at least semipermanent in a human environment constantly shifting under the pressures of the societal bureaus of human emotion and socio-political machinery. While everything constantly shifts, architecture enjoys a monumental remembrance or stance. It is one of the few disciplines, parallel to the fine arts, that struggles between insisting on a perpetual forward momentum while needing to leave traces of past importance behind. And now that there is no clear image, title, or name given to what will be left behind from today, architects are driven insane publishing, drawing, and computerizing what has never been built before when, as proven by centuries of canonical architecture including that of the postmodernists, the greatest, nonindexable architecture in human history is birthed not of the things we do not yet know, or cannot build with our hands, but instead from the will of human creativity and the refined, practiced, but inherent power of the practiced architect.

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New Diagram More, less, yes is a whore. Mies' legend is chipped away so badly that less is now an unintentional result of the architect/designer doing too much, or becoming afraid to. The diagram itself is a somewhat new concept, at least in its current position of grand importance to the practice. At first the cleverness was absolutely convincing, and yes, it still remains convincing today, at least in the sense that one cannot say no to something that mathematically or sarcastically just makes sense, or can they? But architecture never thirst to make perfect sense, in fact, entire architectural movements are founded on the potential for architecture to reach for the sublime; the edge of reality in an inexplicably satisfying beauty as seen with the work of Boullee, LeDoux, or Lebbeus Woods... or progress through a comfortably non-sensical, grotesque, but somehow conceivable art form like the practice of the Situationists. Lust to explain the intricacies of why one will enjoy architecture transforms the discipline into a system of math equations, high school science experiments, and Web 2.0 style, junk food digestibles. This is the diagram generation. Ironically, the saturation of explanation in contemporary architecture leaves architecture struggling to define itself. Inserting meaning into architecture, retrospectively through the new-diagram is like providing a laminated 8 1/2 x 11 infographic before a symphony pre-explaining why certain movements will elicit specific personal reactions. Even worse, new-diagramming architecture in confused attempts to discover what architecture is, or needs to be, leads to the vacuousness at the nonplussed heart of the Nonmodern. Hotel Puerta America Hotel Puerta America, a hotel in Madrid, is a hive-mind of contemporary

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Theoretical diagram behind BIG's Telus Sky Tower in Calgary.

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Interiors of Hotel Puerta America (from e-architect.co.uk)

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egos pressed together in a suffocated shell of architectural vacancy; an appropriate architectural strategy for a hotel I guess, but a devastating image of modern architectural stagnation. The hotel is organized by architect; each floor (interiors only) assigned to a different super-designer to leave their mark of luxury on the hyper-suspecting guest. Among the twelve architects for the twelve story building are Zaha Hadid, David Chipperfield, Norman Foster, and Jean Nouvel who also designed the rainbow shell of the hotel. The place becomes a strange moment in architectural history. It is difficult to condemn the project as a failure; it's built, well published, and in many ways chaotically and sometimes uncomfortably beautiful. But the contribution Hotel Puerta America makes on the discipline of architecture is almost entirely negative and a screaming example of Nonmodernism in almost every sense. Through the desperate conglomeration of starchitects literally stacked upon each other, the anonymity of both persona and architecture inevitably destroys the power that the client was seeking in the first plac . "An idea of freedom come true, a gathering space merging different cultures and ways of interpreting architecture and design. A masterpiece that awakens guestsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; senses, that breaks the mould by using different colours, materials and shapes. A building that ushers guests into innovative spaces, a bold departure from the usual. In short, a hotel that is unique."1 In magnificent architectural irony, the hotel negates all specific design goals purely through its theory. Freedom in design is constrained suicidally through the angst of manic superstar egos on every floo . The "mould" is in tip-top shape after every architect on the project struggles to specifically define themselves as different than all the others. And the "bold and unique 1 http://www.e-architect.co.uk/madrid/hotel-puerta-america

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departure from the usual" is actually just a re-incarceration of the expected and typical, especially of the signature2 architects involved. The hotel continues to be a commercial success. Results (the Duplicatable) When architecture is nothing, it is infinitely duplicated. The nuances that potentially distinguish idea makers are lost in the flu ry of competitions and academic showcases, events historically necessary for the continued forward momentum of architecture that led to the discovery or proliferation of groups like Archigram and, to a more official extent, the case study houses in Arts and Architecture Magazine. But recently, these are small collection samples of the generally accepted and publishable remnants of modernism (and most recently, post-modernism) greatly influencing the student and client alike. The rebellious nature endemic to the architecture studio is long gone, at least above-ground, and with it, the urge for architects to play. Nonmodernists are, at their core, satisfied with the satisfactory, they search for it, and as standards of ambition are oriented towards these sort of projects, distinguished work is, at its best, lauded satisfaction. It is difficult to hear noise when it is doused in white. It becomes a low hum that rumbles in the background and is slowly contributed to by the unconcerned and the satisfied. Nothing is endearing. And in desperate attempts to diagram, theorize, pedagogicalize, and parametricize the original, the noise grows louder until the power embedded in an intrinsic and free architecture is grounded and held captive by those responsible for exactly the opposite.

2 Caruso, Andrew. "Steven Holl: Not a 'Signature' Architect (And Why That's Good)." National Building Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.nbm.org/about-us/national-building-museum-online/inside-the-design-mind/steven-holl.html>.

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The signature architect encounters the deafening white noise caused by his signature.

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Audacity

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The undue extent of self worth that arrogance supplements to the power of the ego, leads to the power of the audacious, the self-supported belief that the impossible is only a step away. Arrogance leads to overwhelming triumph and devastating failure, going off the deep end, and discoveries that lead to nothing ever being the same.

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Guggenheim Bilbao by Frank Gehry; Bilbao, Spain

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Bilbao Bilbao was Frank Gehry's discovery in his own ability to build. The museum is not only a defi itive transformation of a Spanish city (place) or post-postmodern-pessimism architecture (time), but a personal transformation of self, a result of the riskiness that accompanies the ego that convinces one they can will build. The "Bilbao Effect"1 (architecture instilling confidence in cities that new architeccture can redefine place) is perhaps the greatest testament to Gehry's riskiness and audacity to pronounce sweeping metal curves along the quiet riverbanks of industrial, and mostly forgotten Bilbao. A new vernacular inherent to Bilbao put purely Gehry at the same time. Audacity is a forlorn lover to fright. Architects are afraid of the audacious, the absurd, and the stupid. Yet the most successful signature architects embrace this audacious approach, especially in their origins, for a moment stepping outside the discipline into a blinded realm of intuition and necessity, while keeping their intentions purely architectural, and even more importantly, human. If fright is audacity's lover, comfort is a jealous enemy. A comfortable and manicured satisfaction in one's craft at any moment is a dangerous cliff to wander along. The Guggenheim's inherent belonging to the place of Bilbao is both an incredibly unexpected and unthinkable proposal yet without such discomfort and aggression, would never achieve the transcendent monumentality the museum as we know it today. It changed Bilbao, redefined it, and in that moment of redefinition and transcendence, was no longer strictly architecture but much more a manifestation of the person who made it and the people who now occupy it. Gehry's insistence that the museum was the right thing for Bilbao, even amidst the audacity of the 1 McGuigan, Cathleen. "Everyone Will Want A Bilbao." Newsweek 31 Dec. 1999: Web.

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architecture itself, is a generous risk of himself, offering everything he has to say in order for architecture to speak for itself and for a place. Unfortunately for Gehry, the power of Bilbao solidified his place as a starchitect with a signature. Crumpled metal panels and jagged glass suddenly became synonymous with his ego, silencing the decades of experimental Los Angeles chain-link-fence fun and deconstructivist dances with a swoop of a pen, whispering hints of one-linerisms and repetitive one-trick-pony-ness. Yet even the potentially so-called copy cat projects like Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis manage a certain relationship to place and an undeniable presences among the rest of things. However, Gehry may never accomplish even a fraction of the authority Bilbao possesses, not only because it was the first moment of this new "Effect" but because the riskiness is tangible, the humble heroism of such a project is embedded forever in the city of Bilbao, and the blatant audacity to present architecture on the verge of laughable, but instead perfectly placed within the realm of the legendary hints at what architecture dismissively misses now, and stubbornly searches for in a blind and pedagogically anchored, technically defined, and selfishly ambivalent new definition o practice. Persistence I feel this is the place to bring this up. The whole book is meant to explore arrogance and its potential power or destruction. There is a third arrogance that will find little paper space in here, but I believe deserves recognition for its path towards notoriety and in many cases, fame: the arrogance of persistence. Architects sit in a strange place between art and office that often disqualifies them from the ability to simply continuously put themselves out there until somebody notices. There are a select few who

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find success through the arrogant persistence that they are right in their convictions, and simply, nobody understands, but for the most part these efforts, unless massively supported by fissured veins of cash, fall short early on. And while persistence is necessary to convince of talent or ability, persistence in consistent convincing design is much more powerful than empty persistence in an unconvincing quality or a simply loud endeavor. Persistence as a gimmick leads to nothing, but persistence as an inherent quality of creative act leads to power. In pursuits other than architecture the gimmick of persistence is more obvious. Kanye West speaking to Jesus on an artificial, arena-contained mountain achieves a fleeting sense of egocentric importance within the frame of live entertainment. While a less obvious, yet inherently powerful architecture requires less persistence, it becomes silent out of necessity and loud from a more gratifying persuasion.

Kanye West performing atop a fictional mountain during his eezy Tour.

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Generosity The audacity of selflessness is a mythical, untouchable quality in historically great fig res, not only in architecture, but politics, art, and social struggles. Gehry's generosity to the city of Bilbao through the risk of himself, his architecture, and the future of an entire city resulted in an ultimate trust, and thus a result that shifted the fading paradigm of transformative architecture, socially, physically, and urbanistically. Without such generosity, the project risks becoming nothing. The process of generosity requires a gentle balance of ego and fragility; the heart of transcendental and infinite architecture, the infinity lying in the architect's potential to create something in a number of different ways that each retain the same power and embedded, necessary relation to place. Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye is not the only architecture that can hold such power in the field and its immediate location, but Le Corbusier's design for the house, the foundational "machine for living,"2 is the exact and only thing that belongs to that meadow in Poissy, France. Arrogant selflessness of the architect harvests an inherently personal and universally accessible design power. Disgusting Architect's love the grotesque. Maybe it's a cheap move to cause disgust for attention like a child, but the seriousness with which disgusting architecture is practiced, at the very least, allows critique on the outskirts of the discipline, if not just outside the walls of strict and sterile architecture. While unbuilt (paper) architects are free to practice like artists without the constraints of clients and purpose, the built work of fi ms like Atelier Van Lieshout and 2 Feuerman, William. "Sublime Design: Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye." The Conversation. N.p., 3 June 2014. Web.

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Self portrait of Lequeu

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Studio work of Atelier van Lieshout

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the early work of Splitterwerk, NL Studio, and even MVRDV and OMA transmuted architecture into unwarranted and unwonted objects that the public, or at least those within the discipline, were forced to acknowledge as possible, if not successful. Studios like OMA and MVRDV were able to translate the success of audacious simplicity and pointedness into greater success throughout the lifespan of the fi ms. In fact, strange criticism falls on companies like these when their architecture begins to resemble more recognizable forms, or calcifies into a redundant representation of oncecontroversial ideologies of the founders. But theories of the disgusting's intimate relationship to desires of human beings reaches back much farther than contemporary architecture into the history of the picturesque with theorists like Ruskin suggesting that a dilapidated but realistically used windmill is more attractive than the straight-lined, hard edged windmill in another, similar painting.3 We embrace dilapidation, ruin, and the confusing, while always wanting more. We love to be repulsed and we are repulsed by trying too hard to love. The Moon Audacity's final purpose in egotistical architecture is to unabashedly push farther than conviction into the realm of necessary possibility. Without the audacity to believe we could fly to the moon, the initial steps to do it are never found. Without the audacity to paint from intuition and impression, entire movements in artistic history are preemptively erased. The necessity to push further, in anything, is at the roots of audacious and arrogant thought; that an individual has the ability to do something completely new, because they must, at the risk of themselves and their love. 3 Macarthur, John. "The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics." Assemblage No. 32 (1997): 126-41. JSTOR. Web.

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Splitterwerk's unbuilt Romanesco project

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God

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“For when we call the builder the principle of the house, in the idea of such a principle is included that of his art ; and it would be included in the idea of the first principle were the builder the first principle of the house. God, Who is the first principle of all things, may be compared to things created as the architect is to things designed.”1 1 St. Thomas Aquinas, The “Summa Theologica.” Part II. p4

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Divinity The notion of God implies a humility towards a thing (or things) greater than ourselves, yourself, and us. “Greater” in this sense borders on something sublime, indescribable, and unfathomably large recalling the architectures of Boullee and LeQueu but also insinuating an impossibility of realization or physical creation elicited in the starkly built works of such architects. The notion of divinity, or to be like a god,1 comes forth in both the outcome and the process of creation; the chief purpose and principle of the architect herself. Divine transcends its original definition in contemporary culture to a simplified notion of beauty or “delight”2 in an experience or aesthetic judgment, not necessarily removing the spiritual connotations from the word, in fact, perhaps enhancing it. Religious Divinity inevitably leads into qualities or question of the untouchable and obviously unexplainable, thus arriving at the cliched and devastating question of what exists past everything: past life, past death, and past ourselves. God's reaction to arrogance in scripture alludes a sense of constraint and humility in order to have a collected sense of morality and judgement: "For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith."3 - Romans 12:3 Other religious writings reach further past humility: 1 Whitney, William Dwight. The Century Dictionary; an Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language. New York: Century, 1889. Print. 2 IBID 3 The Bible: New International Version. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society, 1984. Print.

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"For the ideal path is not that one be humble ('anav') alone; he must be lowly of spirit ('shefal ru'ach'), and exceedingly unassuming ('rucho nemucha'). Likewise it is said of Moses that he was "very humble" (Numbers 12:3) -- not merely humble."4 In the context of religiosity, ego is at least sinful, the opposing human prerequisite to freedom, hand-in-hand with arrogance and a fatally fl wed trait of humankind, the original sin. But if we remove any concept of holiness from human ambition the ego becomes freeing when embraced in the way of the untouchable architects. And thus we return to the image of god as the architect and the architect as god; not an untouchable deity but instead a fragile human, somehow capable of creating the universal through the architectural medium. Trust from those who encounter the architect or their work is not blindly faithful but instead intrinsically connected through whatever means: emotion, curiosity, or aesthetic bewilderment. The architect is powerful in their most egotistical and exposed state; a selfless egotism that asks nothing from the user while giving everything back. While the contemporary and historical notions of god place the person at a merciful and humbled state, the architect with relative power place the person at the center of architecture, creating work purely about life and the universal pursuit of the movingly beautiful and satisfying sublime. Protractor Religious art depicting God as the architect of the universe presents a man in divine clothing wearing a halo invariably holding a compass during the process of the creation of the universe. The compass is a strangely mechanical and human insertion into such images that acts to relate 4 Rosenfeld, Dovid. "Maimonides on Life." Torah.org. N.p., 2008. Web.

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Christ depicted as architect of the earth and Creation.

God creating the world by compass

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our image of self to some sort of creator as well as translate the idea of creation into a digestible and tangible process that humans distill as building. It also draws the shape of the universe as circular although in most depictions the outline of creation remains circular while everything within it is nebulous5 hinting at the assumption or belief that although the creation of everything is perfect, what is within the sphere of mortal perfection is somewhat accidental, misshaped, and ultimately human. If the creator is an architect, the architect is the creator who harbors the potential to design something utterly original without the overbearing requirement that everything is measured and aligned. In fact, many of these images present the most divine creation, at a certain point, as uncannily imperfect, natural in a way and in the image of us.6 Cathedral Experimentation in architecture stems from a need to express humanity to a divine figure express the power of the untouchable in a necessarily practical and constructible architecture. A building for God still required construction by humans but necessitated an architecture ultimately unfathomable by man. The trick was to test the limits of human ability or expectations, and in doing so the architect became almost divine, creating that which was both unimaginable for the time and untouchable in its existence. Cathedrals possess a heavy grasp on mainstream architectural power and global societal aesthetic culture. They were the center of cities organically, a phenomena still studied and experienced today in the world's most influential cultural, political, and social cities. The timelessness and continued sublimity of the structures created hundreds of years ago elicits 5 (top left) Christ depicted as architect of the earth and Creation. http://creationwiki.org/Creation 6 God creating the world by compass from 15th century miniature in Brunetto Latiniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Tresorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; From Science and Literature in The Middle Ages by Paul Lacroix published London 1878 (Photo by Universal History Archive/Getty Images)

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a holiness in itself, an untouchable architecture and perhaps the earliest example of modernisms keynote address that "form follows function." An untouchable and universal architecture for what was believed was an untouchable and universal truth. Cathedrals and Duomos are only one collection of purely human religious edifices however. Spiritual architectures like Larabanga Mosque (see Nonindexable Index) in Africa and the Ise Shrine (right) in Mie prefecture, Japan step back for a moment from the notion of god at all and are opposite examples of a purely human architecture in the spirit of some sort of holiness; architectures of infinity while considering an acknowledged mortal existence. At Larabanga, the form of the building itself is noticeably handmade, and although it has stood for almost 6 centuries its stature is timeless and seemingly new and ancient at the same time, a quality only untouchable architecture possesses. Ise is rebuilt every 20 to 21 years7 with the explicit intent to create an architecture that is new and ancient at the same moment, original in every possible dimension. Human rigor is visible in the architecture of religion. It becomes a selfless act of building purely in faith of a greater spirit. The architecture of god is difficult to theoretically manage. On one hand the excessive human effort to build for unproven or mythological reasons never ceases to push architecture forward in a strangely contradictory egotistical and selfless way. We build for god but we also build purely for ourselves. On the other hand the untouchable architecture for god is just that, untouchable and universal; barely human in some ways and absolutely human in others. What is proven is the architectural power embedded in faith and a certain spirituality that even the non-religious experience in powerful spaces built 7 Miura, Masayuki. "Ise Shrine." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 12 Apr. 2015.

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Ise Shrine print from Meiji Period, 1880 (Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of Philip Hofer) for faith. Ironically, the most democratic and universal architectures are those built for religious purposes, and perhaps this irony is weighed down slightly by a growing contemporary secular culture, but maybe that was the point all along. Sin of Pride In Christian faiths, pride is the original of the seven deadly sins and the source of the other six. In some senses, pride is what defines us as human, an undue worth set to ourselves amidst an infinity o perfection. "Pride leads to destruction; a proud attitude brings ruin."8 - Proverbs 16:18 But pride is always relative to God. Other scripture reads like submissive 8 The Bible: New International Version. Colorado Springs, CO: International Bible Society, 1984. Print.

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All Is Vanity, painting about the preoccupation of woman and man with themselves, from Ecclesiastes 1:2 (by Charles Allan Gilbert)

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directions to avoid pride in order to get closer with God. Pride in architecture may tangentially relate to god figure , the Rem Koolhaas' and Le Corbusiers built up as deity's by followers, but for the pragmatic, and to some extent the practical, architects capable of discovering this power are important to the existence of the discipline and are not necessarily the face or critical mono-being at the top of it. The diversity of egotistical architects, and the young and ambitious future ones, self-imposes a system of checks and balances that allows no one person to harbor too much sway on the entire discipline for too long. Recently, vacuously less architectural trends guided by confused and anxious pedagogy influence certain trends in representation, aesthetics, and architectural language. However, the more important effect of the white noise distributed by proud nothing makers was the illumination of the importance of a fragile architecture, created by those with the ego to do it, the vulnerability to be seen, and the naively curious, not too proud to settle for what is deemed satisfactory by an inundation of desperate architectural theory and conjecture. Practicality and Rationalism Architectural rationalism suffocates the potential of the discipline. In William James' Pragmatism, God is discussed alongside rationalism in an attempt to free the human mind from the constraints of pure fact and designation of fiction "The optimism of present-day rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed. For men in practical life perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism is but the illusion of the finite and relative: the absolute ground

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of things is a perfection eternally complete."9 Architecture traditionally attempts the irrational in its origins. Timeless architecture possesses a quality of the humanely "in-process" that James presents as necessary to the forward momentum of anything human, specifically architecture and fine music. Architecture is a constant struggle to try out discredited systems, to discredit existing systems, and find other ones. Architecture is defined by a sort of unsatisfied nature, egotistical and arrogant while selfless and al ays built for another person, city, or nature. To introduce the simplistic aims of rationalism into architecture stymies any potential architecture builds over millennia. While contemporary architecture struggles arrogantly to move, change, or discredit systems by introducing new ones, humans are desperately attempting to avoid becoming systematic. Stern rationalism, realism, and practicality leads not only to dullness but eliminates the possibility for the untouchable and the sublime; two intrinsic qualities that architecture and holiness share. "Thus I read in the privately printed biography of an eminently rationalistic mind: 'It was strange that with such admiration for beauty in the abstract, my brother had no enthusiasm for fine architecture, for beautiful painting, oir for flowers.' And in almost the last philosophic work I have read I find such passages as the following: 'Justice is ideal, solely ideal. Reason concieves that it ought to exist, but experience shows that it can not.... Truth, which ought to be, can not be.... Reason is deformed by experience. As soon as reason enters experience it becomes contrary to reason."10 Once again we become nostalgic for the more experimental times, moments 9 James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Print. 10 IBID

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of original thought, and a pressed irrational creative urge to create things that are neither rational nor irrational, but permanent and universal. Obvious and mysterious. Subconsious and automatic. Innate and human. Huge and invisible. "It was once not considered foolish to dream great dreams. Imagining a new, better world energized thinkers and spurred their resistance to the status quo. Now utopian dreams are rare. Instead of chasing after elusive ideals, we prefer to surf the turbulent waves of free-market global capitalism. In out wildly prosperous First World - brimful of computerized production, technological and generic applications, and commercial and cultural entertainment - reality can seem more exciting than dreams."11 Ego convinces us of our correctness, but in an age where every bit of data is accessible at any moment, we no longer look for what our ego desires. The architect no longer struggles or experiments with their dreams. Instead dreams are calculated, ambitions are planned, and architecture is manufactured from data in a practical finale to a spiritual sto y. Pragmatic James' heated reaction to the limits and imprisonment offered by the rationalists was a theory (or anti-theory) of pragmatism. A intensifying fog of overintellectualism pervades the creative pursuits blinding those pursuing the necessity to make. "It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds 11 Saunders, William S. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stocktaking.â&#x20AC;? The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Minneapolis, Minn.: U of Minnesota, 2007. p54

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of demand. It can remain religious like the rationalisms but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest intimacy with facts... Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest."12 We arrive back at God and the possibility of such a thing, parallel with the possibility of an untouchable or universal architecture. James is not arguing for the existence of a god or absence of one, he is simply arguing for the honesty of judgment and living through experience, reserving the freeing ego for oneself in believing that the proven is still not proven, that the infallible is only explained and not untouchable. Systems are systems but are not the perfect end of an exploration. Pragmatism is dynamic and enticingly loose in its very nature. It is a method of interpreting unending disputes which too often is confused with practicality. Practicality has an end while pragmatism looks for none. Practically there is either god or not god. Pragmatically there is both god and no god. Thus pragmatism re-introduces the possibility for a human architecture: contradictory in countless ways, egotistical by necessity, and potentially universal for no good reason at all.

12 James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Print.

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Djinguerber Mosque (Timbuktu, Mali) under restoration.

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Madness

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It’s all madness; chaos. As architects we are in the profession of killing ourselves, constantly tortured by nothing but our own hands. We are indefinitely and infinitel trying to prove we are here, but the only proof we have is standing right in front of us, and we can’t even touch it. To try is suicide, and to fail is our addiction, never getting anything right but always proving that we’re almost there. Almost there. Just about there. Stop! Nothing. Still nothing, all investments stagnant, the price of ego inflated, the value of it all to be determined, and that’s why we die. It’s for value, not glory. It’s all for ourselves and our satisfaction of satisfying others. We were right, God is in the details, the minutia, the parts that cannot be explained. Architecture is God, and we are God’s keeper, blessed with the insanity of self worth and deterministic greed. We cannot explain it so we dive in, because it is there, because we are who we are, and as a cult we love to be lost. Cheers to us for... I’ve never been good at cheers... cheers to us for our madness, here’s to us for our talking, one for us for our worth, one last one for camaraderie. Don’t drink too much, the competition package is due in the morning.

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American Psycho

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The Architorium Initial research into an architecture for arrogance led me to propose an architect's exploratorium, which looks curiously similar to the architect's madhouse... the machinery, the unstill forms, the unfamiliarity in a familiar place that forces some sort of tears in a confrontation with the inability to let go of pedagogy, theory, and structure for just a moment.

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Playground Architorium is a playground of architectural curiosity and personal exposure. It is an opportunity to explore oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arrogance in a satisfying and gratifyingly productive and completely unproductive way. The idea of the place is serious, dense, and straightforward in inception but naive and infinite in its experience; both fun and emotional. The architecture of the architorium is obviously exploratory but haunting, light, and tangible; a place consumable in which one is consumed in a jarringly comfortable way like the blues in a smoky bar youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never been to before. Moments of experience governed by nothing but yourself in an environment capable of every experience. Architorium is not designed to convince, but to curate the freedom from ego that allows curiosity, embarrassment, experimentation, and satisfaction. Freedom. Doesn't that sound nice. Everything runs free and so do you. Not just slides, and ball pits, and merry go rounds, this playground is what you are after, what you could not find until now. The egotistical shell of arrogance that Frank Lloyd Wright so eagerly suggested as brittle is only brittle for those who can break it, and the only person who can break it is the one with the ego themselves. Architorium is a place for the naive, the children of the craft; the opposite of the apprentice, the bastard master who no longer does anything except make. They forgot long ago how to think or find or play, and this is where they are not going back, but re-learning how to move forward. Now before this sounds too prescriptive, I must admit it does, it is exactly the opposite. Maybe that is where the architecture convinces, a freedom through architecture from an architecture through freedom. Have you ever had the moment where the warmth of the sublime, the inexplicable, the undeniably beautiful overcomes you even in the white of winter? It is not found here. This is where you learn the naivetĂŠ find it everywhere, and the power of arrogance to know you can.

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Playgrounds by Aldo Van Eyck in vacant, haunting, post-war urban landscapes built in opposite methods as today's playgrounds, offering mundane objects as basic tools in a terrain of play. Bombs to boxes; and all kids love empty boxes.

DZ Discovery Zone was a chain of extreme, contained, indoor playground environments capitalizing on the childhood desire to run away.

The exploratorium (children's museum) in Delaware has a room of hanging, warped, wood platforms that have no purpose other than exploration.

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Madhouse Our uncontrollable urge to be normal while lusting for the insane makes us the middle of the two, mad; perfectly undeveloped and ripe with enough ammunition to make our uncouth recipe for something, for nothing, for everything. We covet we thirst we want and we spy. We are jealous of those who have no control... if only for a moment. Then what? Do we make something? Do we make the perfect thing? Our madness is a mixture of the curious and the passionate; a fetish for the unstable and the magnificent, for the masterpieces of the masters. If only we could still be taken seriously after a typo. If only someone would salivate over our typo. If only I knew how to make a God damned typpo! But then I'm trying to hard, it's too obvious, they all know me. But nobody knows me. I need to break free, just like everyone else but I know that I, unlike them, am able to. My arrogance is fire hot but I am still just like the rest. If only, if only, if only, then they would see. Our lust is so often mistaken to be for the understanding of madness so we can fix it, or simply satisfy ourselves with understanding the other. Our real craving is for the madness itself, the juicy steak that only bursts open and spills blood with our bight; to taste it, not just to cook it and smell it and see it, but to taste it for ourselves and satisfy the craving until moments later. Medium rare for some, well done for others, yet most will never have the chance. It's sad. Architorium is a house for those who are sad, or angry, or frustrated, but have that thirst for blood. Forget the perfect and focus on yourself, be the best you, you can be, that's all anyone can ask. Except you, you are sick of asking that, you are sick, trust me, you are sick. Breathe, breathe, breathe. In and out, heavier and heavier, until it feels like something. There ya go, welcome, we've been waiting awhile;; go ahead.

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General insanity of room No. 5. Patient in restraining chair.

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fl fl fl e slflflf fffrrff!

17th century insanity mask.

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Arm of an insane asylum patient with hundreds of needles self-inserted under skin; architecture of the self.

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A Fragile Architecture

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Marshall Ford

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A Fragile Architecture

Want want want want. Freedom, potential, and excited anxiety of childhood exploratory naivetĂŠ. Go go go. It's all for a satisfying nothing.

Everything is okay, everything is okay, you'll be better soon. Give me the pills! Give me the chair! Give me the helmet! He just won't stop! Let him go...

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Ego provides the courage to communicate a "new"1 thought through architecture.; arrogance is scaffolding that convinces us other people need to see it, want to understand it, and hold the right potential to experience it. Architorium is an exploratorium and a sanitarium. It is a realm of architecturally manicured childhood freedom that breeds new ideas Fydor says are impossible to explain. It is also the place these new ideas are safe to exist within, without harming anyone. We learn not to hurt here. The problem with contemporary ego in architecture is it convinces one they are no longer mad or strange, shielding the starchitect from the possibility of questioning or insecurity, and eliminating potential for necessary forward momentum. But as one goes deeper and deeper into their brittle shell,2 their craft becomes dusty, distant, and played out. Infant starchitects take a cue from their heroes, growing up within a much harder shell of second-hand arrogance, until their architecture is almost nothing at all. It is a strange evolution we witness in the personalities and, directly connected, the results of such potentially great minds whose arrogance convinces themselves of satisfaction, without any tangible proof of value. On a much larger scale, the ego of the architect is no longer respected as a trait of the profession. A new, vacuous form is destroying the power of the architect and is seen in the ambiguity and mediocrity of many new projects in both the professional and academic worlds. Architorium heals one from the madness of architecture, maybe. Architecture does not necessarily have to become more personal, in fact, maybe it's time we remove ourselves from it healthily. 1 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Idiot. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003. 2 Mike Wallace Interviews Frank Lloyd Wright. Perf. Frank Lloyd Wright. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas At Austin. 1957.

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The story goes that it was inspired by a ship seen from the pier miles away. In reality it was just a mess. The client wanted everything he had seen before but nothing that had ever been done before. The prompt as such was incredibly interesting to the architect: how to provide the client with everything theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve always wanted and expected but find something that never existed. So it began as the familiar, and then it was disintegrated into the absurd and beautiful. Everything was sharp but inside it felt so good, and from a distance it still remained a silhouette of a ship but as one got closer it became less of anything at all.

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It was chaos in the most practical sense. Everything was mathematical and precise but it was an absolute nightmare. It reminded everyone of Morphosis when they had first started if Thom Mayne had run the projects through a grinder and then meticulously stitched the pieces together in the most meticulous and methodical process humanly imaginable; as if the classics had been reconstructed by a genius child attempting to figu e out how to compose what was already considered frustratingly perfect. It was a ruin of futuristic proportions and everyone wanted to live in it. Unfortunately the building preferred the dead.

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Then things got dark. They wanted something with an intimate connection with nature but with all the signatures of the sweeping metal and excess fence, so we gave it to them. They wanted it to remind them of home and the summers they spent in the mountains. Now they can climb till they die. They loved the roughness and everything they had no idea they wanted. Now they can finally hide which is what they wanted all along in their memories of Oz and the terrain on the horizon.

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God, they wanted to show off so badly but they only knew how to do it brightly. That was fin , I can work with that, but their insistence on huge was frustrating; even their own artwork varied in size and obviously had to fit in a museum. So thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s what I did, a city that is too big for them to comprehend, but shattered into pieces that could fill their stupid museum, which I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think I will ever get the commission for, because theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll never know what they want to want.

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Nothing

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“Since the early 1990s the ‘market’ has ruled, so the only tool we seem to have left is seduction,” Kamiel Klaasse remarks. “This creates the unpleasant condition of dependency. Architects combine arrogance with impotence; we are beggars and braggarts” (269). “These days architects can do everything-and, at the same time, nothing,” Maarten Kloos adds. “Architecture has become an amorphous, evasive concept that just hangs like a scent in the air or the latest fad...” 0 0 http://www.archdaily.com/475334/rex-unveils-details-of-five-manhattan-west-development/

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Something The architect always wants to create something, so badly in fact, that architects now are exploring the idea of creating nothing. Part of this desire to discover how to create an absence of something is to figure out what architects are already becoming used to: deigning nothing. Designers are exploring the use of mirrors, smoke, and camoufla e to make buildings disappear. Human fascination with the ability to disappear parallels a certain fear in architecture of allowing the human portion of the architect to make an appearance. These attempts at nothingness hint at the overarching problem of the architect's inability to create architecture that shows or exposes themselves, and thus, the human conditions that determine the design itself. The introverted architect creates a building vacant of purpose, now, on purpose. Architectural disappearing acts are not in themselves the problem. The problem is the obvious willingness to make architecture disappear but the unwillingness to make architecture appear; to make an architecture that exists loudly in an appropriate way. It is easier to make an entire building disappear than one that exists forever either physically or in memory. Cleverness substitutes raw human ability. Architecture is now a magic trick. Tragedy Architecture lusts for the beauty of abandonment and the potential of the ruin. In cities like Detroit photographers, artists, and competing architects flo k to abandoned automobile plants and burned out neighborhoods as a contemporary attraction to ruins supports an addictive beauty of the dilapidated and the hauntingly empty. Disintegration and emptying of urban cores due to tragedy romantically seduces the architect into a belief that a

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“Blur Building” by Diller Scofidio + Renfro -“Upon entering Blur, visual and acoustic references are erased... Blur is decidedly low definition. In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.” playground of opportunity is uncovered beneath the rubble of hurricanes and throughout the emptiness of financial vacuity. Architectural egos are put on clear display resulting from the architect’s lust for abandoned fields in St. Louis and Detroit, cleared physical existences in New Orleans, and the desolate industrial wastelands in somewhat more rural USA. Because of their undeniable beauty and allure of the memory of a place, we begin to compare these remains to ancient ruins and UNESCO world heritage sites around the world. But the difference between the abandoned origins of America and the ruins at Maccu Pichu or Chichen Itza is that people still live in those places. Detroit slowly sprouts from the concrete ashes of its heyday and New Orleans is louder than ever; only a decade after 80% of the city was under water, neighborhoods are repainted in bright

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pinks and yellows and music has returned to the streets.1 There is a clear and direct relationship between the current state of such places and the visible past, whether it’s the empty lots of post disaster America or unforgotten ruins standing monumentally solid in historically foundational cities. Contemporary and pop culture flocks to these places from a distance. Anthony Bourdain explores the relationship between the crowded abandoned places like Detroit and more ancient ruins of human history: “It’s hard to look away from the ruin to not find beauty in the decay, comparisons to Angor Wat, Machu Picchu, Ancient Rome are inevitable. Magnificent structures representing the boundless dreams of the dead, left to rot. But unlike Angor and Leptis Magna, people still live here; we forget that.”2 In such places an overwhelming emptiness stands alongside a romantic and decaying beauty, made heavier by the millions that still exist in places of contemporary urban ruin and desolation. The empty lots are impossible to ignore as the rest of the city frames what many see as the future of post-industrial America. Architects gaze heavily, salivating on such places as both opportunity to socially interfere with a dismantling micro-society and a rare chance to insert their egos and signatures into the new history of American landscapes. It’s a tasty menu, cheap, and available. Nobody will ever be allowed to interfere with Angor Wat, but American culture historically demands intervention into lost places. In fact, institutions look to architects first for commissions in up-and-coming or promising cities like Cincinnati, Texas, St. Louis, and Las Vegas. But tragedy is a heavier subject, weighed down by cultural and social demands while constantly tangible in recent memory and aesthetics of the city. Much of New Orleans remains abandoned after Hurricane Katrina and the memory of the event 1 Deutsch, Ron. "New Orleans, Post-Post-Katrina: 'Getting Back to Abnormal' Looks at Life in the Crescent City." International Documentary Association., July 2014. Web. 2 Bourdain, Anthony. "Detroit." Parts Unknown. CNN. 10 Nov. 2013. Television.

< Voids in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina 265

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is intertwined in the subtle context of every conversation, and while many of the neighborhoods are reconstructed a decade later, other monumental structures like the Civic Auditorium and Plaza Tower sit stalwart, empty and ruining in a landscape illuminated by fli kers of bright colors. In Detroit, many of the tallest skyscrapers sit empty and decaying in downtown, while other pillars to American industry like the old Packard Plant and Michigan Central Station slowly decompose as rejuvenation conversations fade away within a sea of architectural competitions and ruin porn photography books. Places of tragedy, both natural and man-made are almost untouchable topographies of architectural potential; the ultimate paper architecture site. The clients are gone, the money has moved, and priorities have shifted from building upwards to simply moving forward. These are the places ripe with curiosity of how to begin (again), and positioned to cautiously allow the egos of those with the arrogance to do so, to find them Haunting Forgotten places are no longer forgotten. Instead they are some of the most published places in the world, yet still vastly unvisited for several reasons. Websites like Buzzfeed deliver fast food abandonment to Facebook friends and internet surfers with taglines like “The 14 Absolute Creepiest Places to Visit on Earth”3 and “14 Abandoned Places to Visit That Are Otherworldly” choosing an arbitrary number of locations based on either ease of locating basic information or density of photographs in strange corners of Google Earth. Decay, desolation, abandonment, and solitude are very different terms when separated, but in the conversation of the contemporary ruin or urban void, all connote a sense of haunt, eliciting a spiritual response to the lack of life in such places, making the heaviness of the urban void heavier with expectations for a future or nostalgia for a past. 3 http://www.buzzfeed.com/katieheaney/the-14-absolute-creepiest-places-to-visit-onearth#.iynkwEVeZw

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Heavy Void Voids are loudest when found within everything else. The largest cities and smallest towns have voids that speak volumes of centuries, yet lie quiet and vacant in a humble solitude. In the midwest United States, vast, voided urban spaces are the result of an incredible shift of economy and politics. In cities like St. Louis, deleted monuments like Pruitt Igoe are only an icon for a much larger swath of emptiness near the center of the city where crime stats are skewed because of the essentially rural landscape in a technically dense urban fabric. In Detroit, firefighter are up against 40 arson calls per day4 and houses sell for as little as $500 as desperation turns into acceptance of the times. Sociopolitical heaviness signals moments in the city or town where fertile ground lies ready for something new, but begs for respect of everything old. The affordability, available space, and tenuous but existing infrastructural connections to metropolitan pieces like public transportation, office space, and even professional sports teams, are the basic foundation for the most experimental and potentially powerful movements that the near future may see. History thrives off loss and void. The fall of New York in the 70â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and 80â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s made way for a contemporary Babylon of $100,000,000 penthouses and $300 meals. On a micro scale, districts across the country transform in similar ways on the heels of the curious, eccentric, egotistical, and experimental, albeit, those who have the time and minimal capital to do so. Areas like Wicker Park in Chicago, the Arts District in LA, and the Meatpacking District in New York needed less than a decade of time to transform from gritty, empty spaces in sprawling cities to hipster heaven, a term that transforms as fast as these districts do. These are places fueled 4 Bourdain, Anthony. "Detroit." Parts Unknown. CNN. 10 Nov. 2013. Television.

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Obvious nothingness of subtraction through a removal of the primary subject of an image replaced with blankness or a white shape. John Baldessari's Shape of Reason Missing

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Literal nothingness through erasure. Rauschenberg erases a drawing by de Kooning which still exists in some form excavated through x-ray (on right). Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing

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by craft and freedom, regardless of the eventually high costs of living in former heroin and rat arenas. In essence, the weight of the rest of the city, where things have solidified into a museum of its past leads to voids holding responsibility to provide a haven from the rigidly defined and corrosive exterior of the city. But as filling these voids perpetuates a certain hip-ness reminiscent of counter culture, but more directly connected to a contemporary passion, facilitated through mysterious bank accounts, to escape from society, man, one must wonder where the original lies in the entire situation. As an aging Diane von Furstenburg rests in her towering apartment, overseeing the land of the now-luxuriously-hip Meatpacking District, where has the weight shifted? In cities that seem to complete themselves over and over and over again, where does craft of the curious find an infinite playground to bloom into something universal? Cemetery An intimate relation between haunt and void and death intersect at the cemetery. It is a parallel topography to the rejuvenated city, a place that can only be designed using the desirable locales of what already exists and the permanent spatial demand of the dead. The result of this demand and desire are gardens of nothing constructed out of the remains of everything, a contradictory typology seductive to the architect from afar but impossible to obtain in a practical or initially systematic design because of its necessarily organic origins. A few architects successfully created a place to allow the necessary void to occur by stepping away from the project to a point where the architecture became inherent to the place, untethered by the constraints of prior philosophy or standard issue theory. Perhaps the most architecturally revered is Carlo Scarpa's Brion Cemetery

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outside Venice, a project that leads visitors on a contemplative procession, grounded in the simple yet monumental concrete forms that Scarpa carefully crafts throughout the place. However, at the intersection of ego and void lies Enric Miralles' Igualada Cemetery, where Miralles embeds his poetic ambition to intrinsically "find where the earth finishes 5 in a "city of the dead"6 that acts as a natural reformation of ancient land; the intrinsic void, a beautiful scar, for a place meant to embody everything and nothing at once.

Enric Miralles' Igualada Cemetery

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5 Miralles, Enric. SCI_ARC, Los Angeles. 1 Mar. 1989. Web. 6 Kroll, Andrew. "AD Classics: Igualada Cemetery / Enric Miralles & Carme Pinos" 13 Jan 2011. ArchDaily. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=103839>

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Town

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Town is not only defined by the size or rurality of a place. Instead, town connotes a lifestyle or a cultural set of predilections about all aspects of life. The experience of the town is directly opposed and intimately related to that of the city, and in the recent history of the United States both once again merge as towns adapt to widespread urbanization and its unifying and separating effects, while the influence of small towns seeps into the cracks of the city as craft, individualism, and community once again assume a greater role in American culture, now deemed necessary as anonymity and anxiety begin to define the large cities of the United States. The ability for the town to dismantle arrogance and reassemble it into creative power reminiscent of industrious rural America holds great power in a society founded on the power of human drive, will, curiosity, and creativity losing itself in an endless search for divinity or love or purpose.

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Differently Here Pride leads countries, builds cities from towns, and is one of the seven deadly sins. Questions and assumptions of pride and humility lay heavy on the soul of the young man or woman who leaves home for something more, or at least, something else. The satisfactorily static lives of those who stay behind for personal and social purposes no less important than those that built places like New York City, clash with the dreams of the ones who leave for the “sympathy and encouragement of the big city that often turns intelligence into genius.” The returnee to the small town encounters the immediate assumptions that they left looking for something that the community did not provide or did not satisfy in an earlier life, leading to a sudden and vast separation between those who are “from here” and those who “do it differently than here.” This separation breeds a very specific sort of perceived arrogance only possible within the clash of the ideologies of city and town. Harboring potential (or intelligence) for something outside the boundaries of the town often leads to ostracism as soon as the young man or woman commit to college in the city or find work, and a future, elsewhere. A sense of abandonment is imminently felt by residents who choose, or are forced to stay in the small town in which they, their parents, and possibly many more generations built their familial, social, and physical structures. Further resentment builds from feeling forgotten and as more and more small towns are diverted around and slowly erased in a larger social and political geography in favor of efficienc , topography, or shifting economic preferences, the gap between the strength of small town America and the capital of big city America aggressively widens. As rail lines abandon, side roads shrink, and the “nursery land” at the heart of America becomes (unintentionally) an increasingly isolated place for those born in the community of Main Street.

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Fascination with small towns in a rapidly urbanizing landscape stems from curiosity and the nostalgic or pressing urge to find lost places reminiscent of something that was once familiar to an entire generation in the midst of overwhelming homogeneity, political correctness, and increasing urban claustrophobia. The town appeals to the human side of even the most metropolitan man and woman with a certain authenticity in lifestyle, craft, and existence that is ironically manifested elsewhere in completely artificial landscapes like Disneyland’s Main Street USA, where the tourist can visit the town-scaled main street in the middle of Orange County, meanwhile fragments of authentic, miniature utopias continue to exist quietly in places like Zoar, Ohio or New Harmony, Indiana. When everything in society seems connected by the press of a button, the role of the town is reversed, and is now an escape from increasingly anonymous city life as a temporary fix by a temporary visit to a place that remains intact through turbulence of national change. The small town is “the national attic” where fascination is driven by possibly rediscovering something old (artifacts of social, architectural, or historical, monetary, and curiosity worth) while everything in the city is more and more hackneyed in its continuous and repetitive experience. The same thirsty addiction for nostalgia and authenticity is found in shops and apartments of gentrifying neighborhoods in large cities like Echo Park or Silverlake in Los Angeles, Wicker Park in Chicago, and Brooklyn or Harlem in New York. The value of small towns is found deep in crevices of urban America as the impact and importance of old factory towns, mill cities, and places like St. Louis and Detroit quiet. In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Walt Whitman writes of the “countless crowds of passengers” that daily move past each other in the city, and the distance one feels in the city, alone in the masses “disintegrated” in their individual places:

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The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day; The simple, compact well-join’d scheme – myself disintegrated, Every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme… Amidst the noise of these disintegrated masses, life is at times deafening, while the communities that once made deafening noise with smoky production and national contribution have gone quiet. Yet, the “small town tradesmen (still) read the Wall Street Journal” illuminating a national scenario where the town is still very intimately connected with the city, but the city is losing a sense of necessity to remain connected with the small town. This disintegration Whitman talks about not only separates increasingly isolated populations down the side roads in Pennsylvania from those in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, but also creates a vast distance between people literally right next to each other on the street, in their townhouses, or on the subway, accelerated (presciently stated by Whitman) by a new generation dependent on immediate communication and constructing “products” on screens rather than the tools that built an otherwise strong contemporary society. While the small town for some is a quiet remainder of fading generations, it gathers resounding potential to regain the same volume socially and politically as the ages of steel, smoke, and water. My graduate thesis is about the necessary arrogance of the architect as craftsman and the inherent fragility of the architect as a human being. The most personally intriguing and academically rich problem within the conundrum of architectural ego is the ability for that ego to grow in a small town as confidence and pride through ability and craft, but when exposed to the massiveness of the city becomes a protective yet brittle (in the words of Frank Lloyd Wright) shell of arrogance constructed in order to shield oneself from the disintegrated and virulent social existence

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in the metropolis. For architects, the city is the most alluring landscape for legitimate financial, political, and social reasons while the small town remains a purportedly dangerous place dusty with solitude, abandonment, and nostalgia. Yet, to find where the craft of the world’s most famous architects is conceived, we must look into the small town and infantile city environments in which the original product was produced, and in many cases, still exists in a preserved form today. These are places like the small town porches of the Deep South where Blues was conceived, or midcentury LA where modernism was infused with a burgeoning yet inchoate post-war American lifestyle; places fertile for naïve curiosity, fueled by inherent human passion, fused with the egotistical attitude that one man or woman can really do something transcendentally different, that leads to the discovery of the original of the original thing; the creative birthplaces of people like Jackson Pollock, Harper Lee, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Johnson. These landscapes are “theaters of operations, the ground of personal exploration and development.” If not specifically found in small towns, experimentalism and curiosity stems from a small town mentality that begins to seep into the city at the moment the disintegrated masses begin to breed anonymity and grayness. It makes us lust for the derelict potential in abandoned Detroit or the expanses of (not-for-long) cheap land available near booming oil towns like Cotulla, Texas. An ebb and fl w of population moving towards and away from cities is established over centuries. In the first chapter of Moby Dick, Melville establishes the basic human desire to explore the unknown, and for some small town kids, this means planting their own potential in the great city, or far from home and familiarity in frighteningly new places: “Chief among these motives [sic] was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my

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curiosity… I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.” These young men and women find themselves in deep and personal dilemmas when faced with this inevitable desire to explore their curiosity through adventure and change. For the child with obvious talent and intelligence, leaving the town means pushing necessarily towards a satisfying future and, at the same time, the abandonment of a familiar place, culture, and people who unwittingly participated in the construction of that desire and necessity to leave. Two sides are polarized and magnifi d under different contexts. In the city she is either a hero for chasing her dreams or anonymous after a failure to accomplish within the raised stakes of the metropolis. “Where there are not a lot of people it is easy to be innovative,” but for the young, relatively gifted person coming from a place with very few people, although the possibility of drowning amongst all others with a similar potential is highest in the city, the rewards are even greater. This familiar situation parallels the plotlines of fantasy stories discussed in John Stilgoe’s Fantasy and Adventure Simulation seminar at Harvard, where the main characters often the sole possessor of a power that must be used far from home to either save themselves, a world, or home itself. Such novels by authors like Ursula Le Guin are found by children in grade school looking for comfortable confidence with a relatable character possessing unpracticed and unprecedented, but relatable innate abilities, powers, or potential that only come to fruition in the jungle of the big city or a far off fantasy land. However, upon returning to the small town they face ostracism, a sense of scorn, and a purposeful distancing between themselves and those with whom they grew up. A job in New York or a Harvard education constructs

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a barrier between her and friends who never left town out of either choice or necessity or both. The separation is not necessarily caused by jealousy or animosity alone, but a sense that something has changed; â&#x20AC;&#x153;we do things differently here,â&#x20AC;? as a response to those who return as a different (in the eyes of the other) person. The theoretical framework of the small town mentality collapses under the pressure of the one who chooses to do things differently. We all learn from experiences, and if someone returns with new experience, or even with the promise of new experiences in the future, the ground begins to shake, and word spreads along main street. Inevitably this different person acquires, through the eyes of those absent from their lives for years, a sense of superiority and a new cloak of arrogance, which may not always be an incorrect assumption. I am a different person. I was born in Los Angeles but raised in a town of less than 3000 people four hours north of the city along the rocky Central Coast of California. I attended a public grade school at the north end of town along with 240 other students, or about 30 per grade level, and I knew I wanted to practice architecture since fifth grade. The city (to the north, San Francisco, to the south, Los Angeles) always fascinated me as a zoo of opportunity within a dense forest of tall buildings: an enticingly distant, mysterious and promising fantasy terrain for me as a child. I never yearned to leave the town for the city because I loved the liberating unfenced landscape of rolling hills along the Pacific Ocean. After spending a few years as a very young kid in the city, and frequently visiting LA afterward, I grew familiar with the indefinite respite my town offered. But I also knew I needed to leave at a certain point, in fact, I knew I would leave by 18. My parents were raised entirely in suburban Southern California, my father to a working class family from Baldwin Park, and my mother from a large, middle class Catholic family in West Covina. The suburbs for them were

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their small town, safe in size and comfortably familiar. My grandparents frequented the same bars, grocery stores, hair salons, and dairies that existed well before the orange groves disappeared in far-east suburban LA. But as the population of the city exploded the suburbs urbanized, not necessarily in density, but in character. The dairies remained in business (though surrounded by quick and dirty ranch style homes) due to an aging but loyal consumer base, but the bars changed names, replaced by chain restaurants and indoor expansions to the once modern outdoor malls installed in the 50’s and 60’s. This socially devastating but economically explosive growth continued well into the nineties pushing Los Angeles through the Olympics in 1984, the Riots in 1992, and the earthquake of 1994, but pushing my parents farther and farther east, away from home, until they finally decided to move away to a town up north that a few close friends mentioned called Cayucos; a beautiful four hour drive away from the center of the city. When I left Cayucos at eighteen to return to LA to study architecture, I was unafraid and somewhat familiar with parts of the city, although unknown parts still intimidated and excited me. The short and meditative four hour drive north also left sinews of connection with the people and places that built me as a young man, leaving little separation between myself and the friends who decided to leave, as well as the ones who stayed. Not until I was accepted to Harvard did things change upon my return home. My acceptance was met with unexpected questions from friends and family: some shock, some congratulations, but mostly a strange sort of confusion and defensive stance that I never experienced when attending undergraduate school. In a way I constantly felt the weight of the question, “What are you trying to say? (by going to a place like that)” In fact, most of the emotions from others reflected, with an unfortunate melancholy tone, my personal surprise and self doubt that the acceptance caused months

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earlier. On one hand people knew the potential, but on the other hand found it (understandably from my perspective) difficult to not suddenly distinguish the present me from the kid they grew up with down the street. In such moments Harvard was no longer just a part of my future plans; it became an ingrained part of my being. Associations with such places as New York City or the Ivy League weigh heavy on the small town man, but at the same time, provide through their respective experience, the necessary strength to support such loads. This is at the heart of the potentially arrogant man; the man who does things differently, who changes and adapts and takes risks. Arrogance lies at a point just beyond confidence in a place achieved by taking such risks, infused with a bit of luck. But, on the other edge of the blade, if that same person admits they cannot perform a task, or do not know an answer, they are suddenly disposed as useless and wasted. Thus a necessity arises to take the promotion before you even know you can perform the job, because you innately know you can perform the job. Opposite this confidenc , however, is humility, and opposite the shell of arrogance assumed by the successfully architect are the intrinsic qualities of fragility and exposure of the human being. Opening ourselves up makes us vulnerable, and for most, this seems dangerous. This vulnerability is not only emotional but deeply human, a necessary facet in the potential to create something great, embedded in the ability to allow oneself curiosity, naivetĂŠ, and potentially stupidity. There is an even greater risk than the arrogant man takes for the exposed man: a risk of not only failure but embarrassment, and for the small town boy or girl, abandonment and shame in the void of anonymity of the small town. Many great architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; first works are pure experiments invisible and ignored by all except those

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adamant enough to find them under the shadow of otherwise proclaimed greatness. Villa Fallet, Le Corbusier’s first work, is a decorated chateau rarely mentioned in his monographs in the Alps, far removed from Villa Savoye and Ronchamp. Zaha Hadid’s first projects were abstract “Suprematist” drawings of form and space, most of which were never realized. And Frank Gehry spent years treating Los Angeles as a playground for experiments in deconstructivism, brutalism, and chain-link-ism before discovering (or refining) his lucrative architectural craft. But for all these architects, along with the creative founders of the blues, impressionism, abstractionism, and modernism, it all began with an experiment detonating from curiosity and an ego large enough to confident y believe something else existed and insist in their power and ability to find it New generations, more and more, attempt to discover their curiosity and experimentalism through an escape from home. As technology continues to allow immediate connections and overpowers the use of more tangible ways of communicating, the need for developing minds to escape “the grid” expands. This desire is rooted in the basic human urge to explore, create, and experiment, and in order to satisfy this curiosity, young men and women now reach further and further from familiarity leading to some of the most innovative ideas in history but creating an unfeasibility to many children without the means, opportunity, or ability to do so. While comedian Louis CK mentions in a recent interview that children no longer know how to be sad , there is a deeper, subtle, and widespread dilemma of how children find an escape out of creative necessity in a time of pervasive surveillance, ingrained necessity to stay connected, and an increasingly anonymous urban environment. Stilgoe recalls fantasy fiction writers “emphasizing the quietude in abandoned places, especially along old ways, that leads to contemplation and serendipitous discovery that contradicts

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some tenets of modern science.” Today the physical distance needed for most children to feel comfortable independently discovering their abilities, passions, and potential, once learned in the abandoned lots turned football fields of small town America, is now either miles or a foot in front of their face, distances no longer feasible on the “thin-tired, one-speed English Raleigh” Stilgoe mentions in his book, or otherwise immediately satisfied through a three inch screen in even the smallest American town. The most recent edition of Granta (The Magazine of New Writing) is titled “American Wild” and contains one particular poem about a contemporary man performing a contemporary escape in the woods titled “A Meeting of the Minds with Henry David Thoreau”: Although I have heard or could not help myself imagining in quieter times the railway with its clink and flutte , not to mention the lanes and highways, I always planned to leave these woods by following the river as I came. The solitude once found in the North American wild, on and off the road, as narrated by Thoreau or Kerouac is lost as the faint sounds of the highways and railways, paralleled by an anonymous noise of technological devices, seep into the withering cracks of the American wilderness. The hunger of the young man or woman for the wilderness of the city is lost among anonymity and the digital promise of individuality. Perhaps my thesis is not as much about arrogance as it is about longing, and the intrinsically human desire to find, to test, and to fail. Craft in the small towns of America

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remains a monument to this desire scattered in well preserved fragments across main streets, in the taverns, and throughout the shop theory of the North American landscape. One of the most important quotes from this class is “The theory you learn from Harvard should work in a rural Dairy Queen.” What is the purpose of learning things if those things are only understood, enjoyed, or perpetuated by those in the same place as you? Whatever we acquire here intellectually is not strictly for use within the walls of Gund or Sever Halls but is, in fact, best employed just about everywhere else. For a moment I must recall the definition of arrogance found in the Century Dictionary of 1889: “Arrogance: a manifest feeling of personal superiority in rank, power, dignity, or estimation; the exalting of one’s own worth or importance to an undue degree; pride with contempt of others; presumption.” Arrogance by definition is entirely personal with the key term undue. But it is also the absence of curiosity without confidenc , a playful nature without embarrassment, and a quotient of human fragility and exposure in the activity of everyday professional and personal life. My thesis is about a loss of power that parallels a loss of humanity in contemporary culture stemming not only from technological advances and social divides, but from a deeply altered structure of human passions within a global society. Any power of arrogance wanes as anonymity and saturation of common, copied, and controlled egos soak the professional and social landscape in the city. An increasing trend to romanticize and museumify the history and charm of small towns only calcifies their quieting position in the North American landscape, not risking the basic existence of these deeply rooted places, but placing into jeopardy the intimate relationship of small town innovation, craft, and pride to the capital, power, and influence of the great

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American city. The allure of the small town lies in the non-anonymity of the place, the passion for authentic and practiced craft, and the possibility of a powerful, innovative, and creative ego without the brittleness of arrogance. Pride is conceived in the small town, pride blossoms in the city, and pride builds countries, societies, and the individuals who define them

This essay was originally submitted as an assignment for John Stilgoeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Studies of the built North American Environment in Fall of 2014. All references are available in the standalone copy of that paper.

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New Orleans This sub-chapter is less about the city of New Orleans and much more about the experience of the place as seen from the train from Boston to Louisiana. What follows is my site analysis of New Orleans and the South. We left South Station in Boston at 8 this morning and while Elena slept most of the way to Penn Station in Manhattan I stayed awake for New Haven and Bridgeport (though I missed most of Rhode Island). We spend an hour in Midtown walking and eating at her favorite dumpling place. We boarded the Crescent south to New Orleans around 2:15. The timing was perfect. New Jersey and Eastern PA are beautifully falling apart with spores of growth here and there including Red Bulls Stadium which looked small but pretty in the industrial landscape. Philadelphia felt small like Boston. I told Elena that’s one thing I’ve begun to notice along these long haul train rides: even the biggest cities shrink to towns as you travel through more and more. They become neighborhoods of America pronouncing their skylines lit up with company signs framed by the gray skies of the east and the definit ve hilly neighborhoods bordering the lucrative central business districts, define further by subtle changes in houses color, material, size, shape, and width. Now we’re somewhere between Delaware and Maryland passing along a misty shoreline drenched in the lightest imaginable hue of a pink orange mist erasing the horizon and creating an inland sea from the train window. We’ve been traveling for awhile, about 8 hours, and suddenly the country is shrinking. Boston, New Haven, New York, Newark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Delaware are all memories already and the landscape is much different than that along the Lakeshore Limited that I took to Chicago last summer. The Right: street performers on Royal Street in New Orleans

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trees are dead and leafless scratching harsh lines into the sky that disappear as the train gains speed through the suburban and industrial forests. It seems to be raining outside but from our seat it looks like a mist gently filling the voids between the anonymous suburban apartment houses and the stickly trees seeping in greater densities in certain spots and suddenly opening up to the first agricultural fields weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve seen on the trip. Elena is laying on my lap as I type and take not so discreet sips of Woodford as we inch closer to Baltimore. The misty fields remind me of the sunset over northern Ohio during the morning of the trip to Chicago. But this landscape is much harder to photograph, partially because Elena is napping from the window seat (something that I find endearingly demanding), but mostly because the sun refuses to play any part. The landscapes become alien as trees and sky are the only silhouettes blurring craggily on a mistified and falsified horizon over the Delaware countryside. In a moment where everything is statically unbroken and glassy, we cruise along a raised rocky rail line in the midst of the disappearing lake on either side, a misty mirror of the fading pink sky only broken by the wake and faint green light of an aluminum fishing boat heading slowly in the other direction. The beauty here is not inviting but instead horrifyingly enticing. Evil lurks in the woods and mirrors play with the mind. But I am stuck gazing at whatever lake this is, depthless, horizonless, motionless cutting painlessly through a mind that is turbulent with constant activity. On to Baltimore. Later on.. Our last daylight was leaving Baltimore fading out over a misty brown and glassy landscape of winter forests and still river waters. We got off the train

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for a second in DC on a platform sunk between a few mid rise buildings that made the nation's capitol seem more like an office park than a seat of power. Nonetheless we walked from one end of the platform to the other, cementing our footsteps into the city which I only found out later Elena had been to as a child. Walking back to our train car we discovered the Capitol is only steps away but blocked by the mass of the station above us, maybe a bad design decision. We boarded the train again, and within 20 minutes or so the car filled up with passengers boarding from what seemed to be another train on the other track. Sitting next to us was a large black woman who began a conversation with her seat mate before she even sat down, a small white girl going to college in Charlottesville. They talked for a while and I tried to figure out what the next steps on thesis were. I struggled to write anything of purpose and even though Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m certain the topic is correct, after a moment with Elena, I realized I have begun to overflow the pages with words that do plenty but not exactly what I want them to do. I had a few sips of our whiskey and tried to continue but I could tell the woman who had sat down was interested in a conversation which she eventually started somehow and I followed. It went on. It was about seven pm so her talking didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bother anyone and as I had been sipping on the whiskey for a little while I was open to a really any conversation and even though she seemed unstoppable, I was especially interested in what she had to say. By the time we started I had begun to 3D model the house in Cayucos in some sort of desperation to find something personal in the architecture that I do, which isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily a ridiculous exercise, but a ridiculous reason to do so. Thus as we got deeper and deeper into talking about love and race I began to abandon the project, swapping

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Home with porch and makeshift fences outside Birmingham AL.

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my typing for laughing at her honesty and volume. Her southern accent was just lazy enough to keep me completely interested but lost every other sentence for the complete translation, which, mixed with the whiskey and my frustration with my inability to find my project, which has solidified into something stronger than ever before, I completely welcomed and actually enjoyed. Elena had finish d her tea and slightly embarassed by drinking straight out of the Woodford bottle I poured some into the cup which the woman immediately noticed when she came back to her seat. Moments before she had commented on the empty cup for whatever reason, being observant enough to begin a conversation about anything. She was talking to the man in front of us who kept getting her plastic cups of ice, and they were mentioning the drinks they brought onto the train. It only seemed appropriate that I join the conversation and when I casually flashed the half empty bottle to her, her excitement rose as she was both impressed and confused by the specific bottle and with our preference to drink it straight. Soon after that she took the bottle, poured herself a bit into her Natty Ice and we cheersed to nothing in particular. She introduced herself as Pat and we introduced ourselves and told her we were architects. After a few more minutes of conversation she introduced us to the guy in front of us, an artist from North Carolina who was getting dirty with some charcoals in a small sketchbook. We mentioned we went to Harvard and he told us his brother lived in Cambridge. Pat also forced him to go through some drawings which were unlike most things I had seen before, especially what he was working on currently which began as a blacked out sheet of sketch paper that he slowly began to sculpt away at to find some sort of drawing. I never found out exactly what he did otherwise, but he was a genuinely nice guy, a

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rare type that lacks any sense of immediate judgment and finds potential in anyone who has a similar or dissimilar interest. He showed us his drawings of a nude model on a couch, and a beautiful blue watercolor of something I can’t even remember, I just remember the beautifully gentle strokes, and restrained palette of just primary blue water color insinuating some sort of interior view. I think his name was Cedric but I can’t remember. He got off in Greensborough after an exchange of emails and a quick conversation about getting in touch when he comes to Cambridge. It was dark in the middle of all this so nothing outside interested us except for some lights in the distance and the beautiful skyline of Charlotte, where I have to return. The Bank of America building there is a monster on the otherwise quiet skyline which I guess is appropriate for such an institution in a not-so-empirical city. At some point Pat went out for a smoke break, I think in North Carolina, and we started to watch Frank which I figured Elena would like and actually reminded me a lot of Mack and our new friends, even though the only obvious similarities between them that they are from the South. Pat came back and talked to us for a bit but eventually went to sleep until Cedric left when she said goodbye and reminded him that he was still required to draw her “big black ass” nude. She woke me up in the middle of the night around 2am to tell us she was leaving, and in a state of exhaustion I just said “okay.” We’re approaching Birmingham now and I’ll write about the inbetween later, but I can feel a different country here. That may sound cliche but it’s palpable. This is a small town landscape built on industry and brick. These places seem tangible but since our only opportunity to explore them is from the window, or at most the platform, I’m becoming anxious to get to New Orleans.

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The sun came through towards the afternoon of the 17th most obviously on the trunks of toothpick trees whistling by the train. Unlike the north this topography was less littered with steeples and midrise cities and filled with these toothpick forests and shacks with porches. I began to take photos of the homesteads in the forests as we passed, each one seeming to offer a completely different world managed solely by the head of each individual household. Places like Greensborough only broke the rhythm from time to time, and Birmingham was the final city we passed before arriving in New Orleans. The landscape slowly became wetter and wetter as we headed southwest from Birmingham and I began to realize that people no longer associated with regions or cities here, it was towns, towns I had never heard of: Spartanville, Laurel, places with a deep history rooting past the small town facades of the main streets and old warehouse buildings adjacent to the Amtrak stops. Somehow I could easily imagine life in each city, maybe because I came from a place not much larger, or maybe because after spending 30 hours on a train with people from a certain place you begin to understand how to communicate and understand them, not on a linguistic or polite level, but on a social and personal level. The woman who took Pat’s spot from Birmingham to New Orleans was an older black woman who said very little but laughed at my inability to open an organic salsa jar and eventually asked Elena why we had so many snacks. When she responded that we had already been on the train for almost 30 hours the woman simply said “Well then, you need a lot of snacks” with a low respectful laugh and a return to staring at the window at the blurring, stickly countryside. Later on she saw the blue hues of our tortilla chips and asked what they were and why they were blue. I had no idea but we told her there wasn’t much difference between them and normal tortilla chips and when I

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handed her one to try she shrugged her shoulders somewhere between distaste and neutrality, assuming despite the blue color and the extra grains and the hexagon shape they were no better than the normal, the original, the familiar. A certain ambitious curiosity reigns life down here. Pat was the same; our Woodford Reserve was a mystery to her but she more than eagerly imbibed and was pleasantly surprised at the taste. She was less interested in the dry snap peas that Elenaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s roommate had given us for the trip. This desire to know new things drives momentum here, a place steeped and sunk in history but constantly in forward motion ignored by most of the rest of the country and the world. Music here sounds ancient and brand new all at once probably because of the deep rooted experimentalism that led to most of it, but also undeniably, intimately personal mastered and created by both the overall culture and specific personalities o the place. We arrived in New Orleans around 7:45 pm, fifteen minutes behind schedule. The train parked at the side of a concrete slab platform under a thin iron roof structure with the station at the end. New Orleans is the terminus so itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fitting that after disembarking we walk forward into the city instead of sideways like LA. The station is a strange French inspired, dusty rectangular room, with mid century chrome circular banks of phone booths and black marble for every wall. Our host, Rob, met us outside the station and we drove in his silver Impala from the station towards the French Quarter, along the way pointing out the lit up Superdome, Canal Street, and the quiet residential neighborhoods at the edge of the French Quarter. Rob was a somewhat weathered man, with some obviously subtle politics

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about the culture and structure of the city, but incredible welcoming and generous. The ride took us to Frenchman Street where he rolled down the windows and cruised so we could hear all the sounds coming from the plethora of venues and streetsides. Everything was quieter than I had expected, the silence pierced by a purity of horns and strings with a little piano from time to time. Some chatter could be heard from the doorways but otherwise the city seemed to quiet for the performance of everyone. A darkened theater with an intimately interactive performance of many acts, spotlighted by streetlights, and filmed in the memories of those curious enough to stumble into the sparsely populated bars and venues. At the end of Frenchman Street he pointed towards Marigny where he figured weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d be interested to stroll and then took us back through the French Quarter to St Louis Street where our house was. The quietness of the neighborhoods was romantic and comfortable, almost what you would expect a city to be if you literally picture it as a private playground. We arrived at the house and Rob let us into the lavender and dark wood foyer which was twice as wide as any apartment staircase in Boston and we walked up the grand stair to the third floor; we were in apartment G. We walked in and found a living room with kitchen along one wall and a bedroom with 12 foot ceilings and a window leading out to a balcony with an iron fence. We learned in the car that this was actually a gallery because its supports went down to ground level, which Elena loved because of the thin elegance to the structure. The window opened upwards and we sneaked onto the balcony overlooking St Louis Street up towards the cemetery and down to Bourbon Street whose loudness we could faintly hear from above everything. Rob came up, we thanked him, and he left. We admired the place, thanking ourselves for choosing against a hotel and not be too afraid to live next to Bourbon Street for a second. We took showers

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Window-way to balcony above the French Quarter

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to wash the train off of us, and once we freshened up we left. We headed to Bayonna first for dinner which we had heard of in our little travel book but it was closed so we kept walking. We walked down Bourbon Street, it’s intimidatingly hedonistic daiquiri bars and strip clubs quickly pushing us back towards the quieter parts of town looking for a place open until 11. After very little success but incredible sidestreets and backstreets we stopped for a moment and looked for anything open past 10 besides a 24 hour burger place we had spotted. Elena found a place named Chartres House on Chartres street and we quickly headed towards it. The path to it led behind the Cathedral and a small park with some quiet homeless people, and to a tiny hallway between two buildings where the restaurant entrance was. Inside was a low volume bar with well dressed men on the stools and some well-to-do people our age at the tables. Everyone dressed like a celebrity (in LA) but all acted like gentlemen, friendly and unsuspecting, dapper but casual. Elena asked for a table outside even though I could tell nobody was sitting out there. The waitress was surprised but genuinely polite and had someone set up the table within minutes. We were led to the back of the patio at the end of the hallway to an opening with only two tables, one in a corner by an old brick wall where we were seated under the light of three candles. The set up was indescribable and all I could compare it to was a hypothetical situation where if I had planned a perfect dinner with just two of us where I would propose midway with a historic building backdrop. The weather was room temperature and we sat under a heat lamp in our private corner. I ordered a drink called “The No Fun” which may be the best whiskey drink I’ve had outside LA and Scotland, a concoction of Bulleit Rye and some fruity stuff that tasted like a fancy antique store. Dinner was just perfect,

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she ordered quail and I ordered a fried chicken sandwich that fell apart the moment I bit into it. We enjoyed it, talked about how perfect it was, and talked about how her dad poorly proposed to her mom over another dinner. Dinner ended and we were the last ones at the restaurant, the inside was just filled with upside down chairs. We walked down Chartres Street a bit before heading up Saint Louis back to our place. We were tired from the 37 hour train ride so we slept easily despite the rowdiness leaking off a Wednesday Bourbon street half a block down. December 18th, 2014 We woke up late giving ourselves time to wake up from our first night in a bed since we left Boston. We planned to go to a restaurant a few houses down called something that I can never remember but we walked in the front door a while before breakfast was starting so we decided to go somewhere else. The day was about walking, both Elena and I prefer foot to any other transportation, and we begun one street off of Bourbon before heading towards the river and finding a quieter version of the street that was going wild the night before. We walked away from the city along Bourbon until the party stretch ended and the French Quarter started again. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember exactly the sequence of streets we walked but we meandered looking at a few shops and then turning back towards the towers of the city. We eventually found canal street a strange concrete river separating the business city from the French Quarter and in a way acted as an invisible boundary separating the comfort zone for tourists from the grittier warehouse district and side of the city that followed after a looming overpass in the distance. We crossed canal down St Charles street towards a restaurant called Pesche which was highly recommended by students from

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the Alimentary Design studio that traveled to Louisville and Louisiana. As the neighborhood scale shrank past all the office towers the restaurants and galleries of the district appeared in a moment of bright clarity about how the rest of the city might look like, punctured on certain corners by the same galleries we had seen closer to our house. We found the restaurant and were the first ones inside. We were seated by the window and I started with a local beer and Elena had the satisfied smile I see so often and cherish every time. She immediately wanted everything on the menu and I couldn't blame her, though I was slightly less excited for the food itself but excited at the opportunity to taste the city. She ordered gumbo and some raw tuna, and I ordered a shrimp roll. We sat by the window in a modern space with highlights of wood and antiqued steel as casually well dressed parties began to fill tables around us. Everyone in the crowd looked like a celebrity but the environment was absolutely opposite of LA, zero pretension, nobody trying to show off, but everyone enjoying their time authentically and seriously. The food arrived, Elena was in heaven having me try everything, and the shrimp roll was meaty and satisfying. The raw tuna was an incredible cut that was dense in fl vor and even the lingering aftertaste of spice and freshness was a welcomed guest in my stubborn mouth. Like the night before the service was genuinely attentive and happy and we left almost speechless. From Pesche we walked down more streets stepping into a gallery of impressiomodernist paintings in a delicately white and postmodern interior space. Further down the road we passed a children's museum that had a subtle but inspiring view upwards through playspaces towering inside. It was the moment I realized that my thesis would be something like that, a

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place where architects could play, that would inspire curiosity unspecificall , but architecturally. We continued, looking for a used guitar store that we never found, but continuously admiring ourselves for the incredible circumstances that fall in place when we allow them to. We’re naturals. Deep in the warehouse district we found one of the bigger music venues in town, The Howlin' Wolf, closed up, but beautifully painted on the outside with a mural on the tin sides of the strange urban barn. We grabbed a sandwich at Butcher (Cochon’s sister and more casual restaurant) for later and headed for the cruise ship, casino area. It was as uninspiring as expected but we did get some information on the swamp tour Elena insisted on. The best part of the waterfront by the shopping outlets was a 30 story (or so) faux brutalist building left abandoned at the shores of the city. We sat and ate the sandwich by a steamship tooting Christmas songs and headed back into the French Quarter stopping at one store in a historical museum where I bought a music box that plays “You Are My Sunshine.” After a few more blocks, and knowing we were heading out for the night, we headed back to the room to rest for a bit. Elena napped as she started to feel sick and I lounged around, sitting on the balcony for a bit and watching the sun go down around 4. When she woke up we found the energy to get ready to go out, but we fell back to a more casual wardrobe, saving the dresses and lace for another night. We headed towards Frenchman street, following Bourbon Street until the noise and lights faded into just another street of gritty romance, farther and farther from the center of the city. As we approached Frenchman the houses got smaller and the lights got dimmer, only sparse spotlights

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Houses illuminated in Marigny neighborhood at night. illuminating brightly colored houses on the narrow streets in Marigny. We found Frenchman from the north, and like the car ride the night before, the sounds were a comforting ooze surrounding us. We were hungry so we headed for a little Italian place above a bar that was quiet when we arrived. Upstairs was a room of about 12 tables with plenty of house wine served all around. I ordered a cajun sort of chicken parmigiana and she had a shrimp pasta. I had a glass of wine but Elena was feeling sick and decided not to drink until later. After dinner we headed downstairs where a man with a guitar and another man, I think on some sort of drum, were playing a heartbreaking but beautiful not-so-gritty blues. We thought for a second of staying but we knew we were looking for something else. Instead we headed outside, walked to the end of Frenchman (only a couple blocks down) and then started our slow, indulgent Frenchman music crawl. We started at a place (and I am not going to remember names) that was red

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inside and mostly filled with tables facing the contemporary, young blues band at the front. Elena and I sat towards the back and I ordered a Sezerac, a New Orleans treat I guess, though it tasted like an old fashioned with a little extra sugar. The band was good, especially the loud, female vocalist, but the venue seemed sort of mainstream, and not exactly what we were looking for. I finished the drink, with a little help from Elena, who still wasnt feeling 100% and we left after 4 or 5 songs. The next place had a historically classy, but contemporarily divey feel; it was big but pretty empty and on stage was a low key but talented trio. I ordered another drink, a whiskey on the rocks, and we watched a few songs from the bar. The part I will never forget, though, is when a sketchy guy came in off the street and said hi to the bartender. Elena and I hesitated for a second, at least noticing him, thinking he was looking for change, until he got on stage and started playing trumpet. We stayed for another song or two, admiring the musical depth of the city, and then moved on. We had reservations for a place by this time, and after passing a big empty blue room with a very modern jazz and electronic act playing inside, we were seated at the back of a place that kind of felt like a coffeeshop, but had a promising piano and strings ensemble set up on a stage where nobody was playing. After ordering a few appetizers (olives and edemame) the band came back and we stayed for a little over an hour. The music was good, the piano was new and much appreciated, as we just sat and talked endlessly like we have since we met. To be honest I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember exactly what any of the bands were except for fragments like the guy coming off the street to play trumpet, or the loud lead singers of the first band, but I remember the night vividly. The city

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offers a freedom to explore that I have never experienced; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s almost a dare or a taunt, nonviolent of course, but so incredibly generous. After that place we headed out with no real plans. We stopped for a second at an all female bluegrass group on a bookstore stoop for a song or two, then headed into the Spotted Cat, a complete dive with permanent scaffolding on the outside as if the renovations are just about done, that I had wanted to go into since we saw it on the first day after the train. Inside the door was a dense crowd facing the stage in a tight corner just to the left. I ordered a beer and we found a table near the back to sit at while listening to the music through the crowd. The music was rough and good, kind of exactly what we were looking for, and although nobody in the crowd had really any personal investment in the band, nor their sound, everyone sank into a deep appreciation of the noise emanating from that corner, spilling down the rest of Frenchman Street. It was my favorite venue by far. Afterwards, the walk back was beautiful and refreshingly quiet. We stopped in one bar on the corner of Esplanade and Royal for a second. I thought about ordering something but Elena was tired so we left before the first song was over from the band. We walked through a silent French Quarter along Royal street, past the cathedral as the few homeless set up for the night and the big drunk white guys stumbled to their second or third bar around midnight. New Orleans is lit by a divine and universal low white light. Every building is visible like a stage set after the actors have left, set in three dimensions with metal railings, gold Fleur-de-lis, and every color perceivable to man under the dim light. The romance is dark, not only because of unforgotten tragedy, but because of the silence settling clear as crystal over the French

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Permanently unfinished facade of The Spotted Cat bar and music venue. Quarter as night falls and Frenchman fades into the darkness towards the Ninth Ward. Bourbon Street is a funny strip of strangely artificial light, yelling boys, and pressure to imbibe. We crossed the harmless mayhem easily and made it back to the apartment half a block away. I finished writing about the train as Elena drifted away.

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December 19th, 2014 Our adrenaline had settled as we woke up late. The first thing on our minds was breakfast, after a night of drinks, music, and urban romance. We were also moving at noon to a neighborhood just outside the French Quarter called Treme, the extent of which I knew was the birthplace of Jazz, a Bethlehem of timeless sound. We got up slowly and walked around a bit, exploring the daily aftermath of Bourbon street during business hours, before heading to a diner near canal street for a cheap and heavy breakfast. We had an hour or so before we had to move out so we walked around the French Quarter finding street usic and used book stores. The city was overcast and threatening rain as we explored the compact towers of books in one store and the glass cases of pralines in a seemingly hidden sweets shop across the street from a restaurant named Antoines that we held closely as our future “nice dinner” for the trip. A fi e piece folk band played in the middle of Royal street as we watched form under the awning of a nice ribs restaurant near the cathedral square and I could tell Elena was in love. The singer was a woman yelling through a loud speaker as the rest of the band played beside her, one guy walking around the small crowd asking for tips. You know what, that might have been the day before, but I’ll never forget the look in her face when she said, "That’s what we came here for." Yes, yes, yes, I remember now. It was raining. We barely did anything on our way back from the diner, except fail to find an umbrella at CVS. We ran from awning to awning along Bourbon Street, the street with the most awnings, but also the most blaring EDM and dance music at 11:30am. We

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were soaked by the time we reached the gate to our place on Saint Louis street, and unfortunately Elena had really begun to feel sick, so any romance inspired by the pouring rain in a city of endless music, quickly turned to loving and dreamy exhaustion. We emptied out the room in less than 20 minutes, leaving things in order and taking a few photos on the gallery and rooftop gallery before calling a cab to take us a mile or so to our next place in Treme. The rain continued as we waited outside the house and closed the gate for the last time. We hailed the second cab that passed and it drove us up and out of the French Quarter and into a quiet neighborhood just north past the monumentally abandoned civic auditorium. We turned right onto the street that was listed under our reservation and drove Treme, half full of reclaimed homes with new purple and yellow paint jobs, teeming with planters and Saints flag , and the other half a collection of abandoned, burned, and emptied homes on the verge of toppling. So close to the French Quarter, we felt very far away from anything tourist and completely engulfed in both the historic neighborhood and the memories of a louder place that existed only decades before. This was where Jazz had started and now, maybe fittingl , it laid quiet and royal. The cab pulled up to our place: a salmon colored shotgun home with a two story addition in the back with vines growing on the outside and four mailboxes next to a locked iron gate to the right. The colorful wood boards painted a texture across the neighborhood of horizontal trellises of individualism and hope; hope for anything in the future, and solidarity in the richness of the present moment. Treme invited one to be proud just to exist within her.

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Our host pulled up on his motorcycle in the rain, let us in to our room in the back of the house quickly, and after a little small talk about architecture (he was an architect who had studied at Tulane and was currently working somewhere in the city) he was gone and we were left alone, wet, and in a mood where only smiles could talk. We sat around for a bit, looking through his library of architecture books and philosophers pleas, and then settled in for a couple hours of nothing. I read a little Moby Dick and wrote whatever came to my mind about the trip to that point, suffering from a familiar lack of vocabulary to describe a place that is all its own, and within itself, so many other things. Suddenly our new neighborhood had unlocked a new maze of life within a city that for some reason, no matter how quiet a neighborhood or street was, seemed electric with life and sounds, and color in every possible dimension around us. We got in bed with the heater on and began to dry, and as Elena slept I continued to write, looking through the hundreds of photos and videos from the train ride and miles of walking the day before. I dozed off for a second before realizing the cemetery was going to close in an hour. I went by myself. The rain had eased to a bearable rate, though my camera slowly became wetter and wetter as I snapped photos of the dilapidation and rejuvenation; every new color a completely different representation of the life existing, or past locked inside. It took 30 minutes to reach Saint Louis Cemetery No 1 which I approached from the east side, following a white concrete wall around to the front of the cemetery where, in the middle of the white wall like the opening of the churches in the California Missions, a single gate swung open to invite me into the maze of crypts, mausoleums, and monuments. The rain fell silently between the stones, dispelling much of the usual pedestrian traffic and leaving me alone within the walls with

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only a few others I spotted between crypts as I walked around. I walked without purpose, constantly in a background of seeping and rusting textures and sharp, concrete shapes, sometimes marked with XXX for the more well known residents. The intense curiosity of any cemetery is rooted in the variety literally caused by the diversity of human life. The cemetery is an architecture deeply embedded in both culture and the individual shaped by such culture. In New Orleans, because of geography and the water levels each grave is built from the ground up, leading to a hauntingly beautiful mosaic of silence and solitude. I just kept walking, rarely looking at the actual names or dates of those buried within, but admiring every crypt, touching the deep gray and orange textures, beneath hanging roses and brown moss, that left my fin ers brown and scratched. As I reached the back of the cemetery, which lays empty with just a roughly growing lawn and a few newer graves, everything was completely silent except for the dying rain, and I realized the gates were going to close in two minutes. I headed for the entrance, walking quickly but distracted by the unique textures on every single mini mausoleum. Some seemed to drip melted stones with a roughness like large grained sandpaper with muted blue and gray colors like frozen metals. Others were rusty orange with stone roughness but patches of clovers and hints of moss softening an industrial tone into something more corporeal. The rain had made it more difficult to get back to the gate as I jumped from crypt to crypt like islands in a shallow bog of crystal clear water. My socks were already soaked however, so the stakes were not as high. When I reached the gate I saw a figure with a jacket over its head slowly walk away to the left, and in front of me, the gate was unapologetically locked, so the cemetery immediately became a jungle gym of escape routes. But I was in love with the setting, the rain gently coming down at this point filling in canals between the stones, the reflections of

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which created a second underworld, upside down and fluttering with every raindrop in the hues of gray and blue and orange that seemed to define the city at this point. A woman arrived a few seconds later. She asked me a few questions in a German or Dutch accent, postulating how to escape, not that she was irrational, but it sure did seem like the beginning of a horror novel that would last more than just a few minutes. I was incredibly comfortable, I wanted to float, I debated staying for awhile. Outside the gate was a van marked “New Orleans Cemetery Upkeep” or something like that, so I knew someone else was in the walls with us. I looked around but found nobody, and after sizing up the crypt closest to the wall, I decided to wait. A few minutes later a big black man, over six feet in humble clothes, with a jacket over his head to protect from the light rain, walked slowly down the center aisle with a set of jingling keys. He began to mumble something and as he got closer I noticed a lazy eye, a big confident grin, and a jolly southern accent saying “Only two tonight huh? Not too bad.” I asked him “Are there usually more?” and he replied “It varies day to day. Sometimes more, sometimes less,” never looking at me but looking forward as if he was following something he has never been able to catch. Per what seems to be his daily routine he unlocked the gate and let us out, yelling back towards the rest of the residents “Locking up! Anyone here?! Locking up!” The gate swung open to no real relief of myself and he said with a chuckle “Now you guys go back to your hotels now.” For whatever prideful reason I let him know I was staying in a house, to which he replied, "Oh yah me too, nice warm house. You get back to your house then now. Unless you want to stay here,” he said with a laugh,”We’ve got plenty of room,” as he locked the gate behind us. I said thanks with a satisfied smile

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An avenue of Saint Louis Cemetery No 1

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and headed towards home. The walk was surreal. For some reason that was the moment I felt like I had really tasted the city. I knew that Saint Louis is the most popular cemetery but I literally felt it, and it was something new and indescribable. It belonged here and somehow I was let in. The fact that I was almost locked in was incredibly satisfying that in some small way I knew how to exist here. Our primary goal for the night was to find tacos we had seen on Anthony Bourdainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s show when we first started planning the trip. The truck was supposed to stop somewhere in uptown, on the other side of the city, an area which we had little hope of really seeing at this point. But we left to find it anyway. On our ripoff taxi ride to the St. Charles streetcar we realized that we were also heading in the direction of Tulane, an architecture school that a few friends had attended. We were dropped off near the main trolley stop on St. Charles and Canal but had to run to catch the car further down. It was $3 for an all day pass which we happily bought. The ride was classic, the seats were wooden and we were only two of a few people on the car as it passed, at twilight, the mansions along St. Charles which were somewhat underwhelming but classically stately. We exited in front of Tulane and found the architecture building immediately. The door was open and the building was vacant, perfect. Elena and I went in every room. The studios upstairs were large and almost church-like with vaulted ceilings and views to rooms upstairs, always leading one upwards towards a studio, climaxing on the very top floo , in the roof, from which there was a clear view into the other studios below. We controlled the lights and made the building ours for about 30 minutes before we both were really hungry. Only a few projects remained from the semester so we took a book

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of student work (it was free) and headed back to the streetcar which arrived in a couple minutes. According to twitter the taco truck would be parked outside a bar named The Kingpin in Uptown. As usual this happened to be immediately in our path to wherever we were going, so we got off the streetcar after a mile or two and walked towards the bar. The truck was gearing up for dinner so we sat in the bar for twenty minutes listening to some sort of 80’s mashup album while I had a local beer. The bar was full of locals, the kind that look at you, but don’t really say anything with their eyes. Every age group was represented, and the cougars fit right in with the static tv gray hoody wearing guys talking about sex and drinking like college kids. It was comfortable, we felt embedded and natural, and the place smelled like lovely smoke, much different from anywhere in California and actually incredibly comforting. It reminded me of Cayucos. Elena went out to check the taco truck and came back with fi e tacos including a crawfish taco, one with shrimp, and a few other Cajun inspired Mexican recipes. The tastes were brand new and as soon as the steak taco hit my mouth the taste introduced itself loudly but refined, in a southern gentleman way, where you meet the guy and have a few clean, scotch drinks before discussing the deeper aspects of why you’re even trying to live. It was delicious, I only needed one, and I was satisfied. This city has introduced me to the potential of taste, and I think those tacos will be locked somewhere in a permanent collection. The others were also delicious and we left full. After one more beer the bar began to fill with what seemed to be a going away party so we left. We stopped by an ice cream place on our way back to the streetcar, which Elena thoroughly enjoyed. From the end of the line, at the edge of the French Quarter, we took a taxi back to the house where we had an early

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The X’s of a Voodoo Queen’s tomb at Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1

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night in, listening to the rest of the rain as we fell asleep reading on a bed made out of sanded plywood planks and cinder blocks, in the back of a shotgun house, consumed by a quiet neighborhood on the edge of the music in New Orleans. December 20th, 2014 Morning was dry and gray, making Treme sound even more silent than during the dousing the day before. The sun lit everything in a new way creating unfamiliar shadows, recreating the city again within the walls of the bedroom. We had plans today, the swamp. Since Elena had missed the cemetery the day before, that was our first stop before heading down into the heart of the French Quarter to catch a bus to the delta. Saint Louis No 1 was different that day. Small groups walked in tandem from point to point with young tour guides pointing out the more famous crypts including Nic Cage’s strange, white pyramid and a voodoo queen’s concrete coffin plastered with lipsticked XXXs. The day was brighter, but most of all, things had dried and I was no longer alone. We walked through the labyrinth on a different path, no longer jumping from island to island over the mirror rivers but strolling casually, the only obstacles the tour groups that gathered in some tight quarters. Elena enjoyed it and I was obsessed with the textures now that I had more time; the whole place was a collage of age and weathering, patina’d with not only rust, but mold and moss set on a pixelated, rough concrete backdrop. We took a few photos of each other, Elena growing fond of the feel of my camera in her hand, a replacement for the film camera she forgot in the room. Some of my best photos were taken in that cemetery that day.

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We left after less than an hour and went past our old place on Saint Louis before walking around the Quarter a bit and stopping into the Faulkner House Book Store where Elena had the woman pull out first edition originals of a few of the more interesting covered books from a case in the hallway. We grabbed hot food from a diner we passed on the way and boarded a bus with cushy seats next to the visitor center by the waterfront. I always figured the tourists were all over the French Quarter but I guess many of them just explore the area closest to the river, the casinos and daiquiri shops filled and lines to beignet stores fl wing out onto the crowded sidewalk. We sat in the bus and ate. Only two other girls sat in front and we were excited for a lonely ride out to the swamp. We figured the rain had scared most others away. The bus toured through the Quarter and picked up a couple people at a time until we stopped in front of some giant hotel where a bachelor party of 10 guys boarded with 24 packs of Coors light in hand, most drunk already if not trying to chase the hangover. I was entertained by the company, while Elena was understandably a little off-put as she clung to me comfortably while one guy discussed his vomit potential for the 40 minute ride. We stared out the window like the train, seeing the whole city in daytime, filled with gaps of grassy fields and watery passageways. The compactness of the neighborhoods we had stayed in felt distant as the skyline was seen hard against the gray sky far in the distance. Traditional shotgun houses slowly turned into suburban residential places, still just as damaged as the center of town, burnt out and boarded up next to strips of young, empty land, but offering a less romantic, albeit just as realistic image of an infinitely recovering city. One bridge sent us above the city, overlooking a river (not the Mississippi) and a vast landscape of megalithic, empty warehouses.

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We eventually crossed the lake on the long bridge we paralleled on the train at night, but finally saw flat, watery landscape in daylight with slivers of civilization along each side. After crossing the bridge the drive took us through some back-roads and houses on stilts before arriving at a shack at the base of an old metal drawbridge. We had arrived at the swamps. Inside we bought our tickets and divided into three lines. The bachelor party was luckily not in our line as we walked down to the metal boats. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know much about the Walking Dead but our boat driver reminded me of the guy who died in the second season, a little like Uncle Daryl, with a goatee, hunter baseball hat, pensive sort of eyes, but younger, and with a solid southern accent. He seemed tough on the outside but as we got deeper into the swamp he softened until it felt like we were riding along on a hunting trip or the route back to his shack on the river. We left the dock and as the huge steel drawbridge behind us shrank in the distance, we slowly drifted on the river. Things were dead. The palette was mostly gray with hints of past lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s greens. The moss on the hanging branches had turned to a beige white, like the cotton inside a cheap pillow left out for 20 years. It was soft and mythical. After a stop at the edge of the river to watch some trained pigs eat marshmallows we continued down. The mood on the boat was casual and friendly. A couple other people were foreign tourists like us, but the others seemed local, from Mississippi or somewhere, and made small talk with the driver the entire time. The first part of the ride was scenic, neither of us could stop taking pictures of the deep terrain filled with softened gray trees and upturned roots. Everything was dimmed with the browns and grays, something that would initially seem sombre, but in reality was heavenly, a misty journey through a quiet and noble landscape unchanged by anything but tides and weather.

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Informal swamp houses with outdoor porch living rooms / docks.

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As we drifted from the part of the river by the road and docks we picked up speed, the wind hitting our faces with a chill that told us we were going deeper into the swamp. I would guess a mile or two down the river we began to see houses along the shores, each with different outward or subtle messages top the tourist passerby. Graffitid facades joking â&#x20AC;&#x153;Alligators love tourists, they taste goooodâ&#x20AC;? and Confederate flag . These homes were completely personal. None were connected to roads, and many had porches in front, on the river itself. Our driver explained that the houses were essentially informal, built by the owners on the banks of the river with informal connections to infrastructure, and only tied to any real city by the waterways, formalized only decades later by the government. Katrina had reached this area too, many shacks sunk in like rotting pumpkins along the banks, providing a picturesque, ruined, horizontal landscape of rusted metal roofs and rotting wood walls, but also illuminating the very real existence of informally fragile communities in the south. Shrimping and crabbing boats were parked outside a few offering a slight glimpse into the livelihoods of the people in the swamp. About a mile downriver from the first house we turned around and meandered into narrower territory where trees left their footholds on the grassy earth for deeper waters. After a missed encounter with a raccoon we slowly found ourselves deep in the swamp where branches dipped into the brown water and the only sounds anyone heard were the voices on the boat, which for moments at a time would stop, and I would soak everything in; an entirely alien landscape that suddenly, through silence, I became immersed in. We spent some time in the deep swamp before heading through a few narrower passageways, a mile or two at full speed, and back to the dock. We disembarked, wondering whether to buy the stuffed $20 alligators in the

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store (Elena didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t) and got back onto the bus, trying to make reservations for dinner but ending up with none as we returned home. The bus dropped us off in Treme after Elena improvised a bus stop before we found ourselves deep in the French Quarter with the bachelor party. We dressed up and went out, walking back to Frenchman for our jazz night. I had a few beers before leaving and we ended up eating at a Japanese restaurant with a generic jazz band playing near the doorway. Our main plan was to finally see Washboard Chaz at the bar across the street, the one illuminated with a deep blue from the inside. After dinner we walked in, the only ones at a table (a couple others sat at the bar), we sat and watched a few songs, talking to each other as if we had the place to ourselves (which we did). We stayed for an hour, clapping every time Chaz finished a song, eventually joined by a few more groups sitting at the edge of the room at their own tables. He really did play the washboard with a couple other guys on a dobro guitar and something else. I was on my fourth drink and enjoying every moment of it, in love with the girl on the other side of the table, and in love with the city as it sang to me. We left satisfied, Washboard Chaz being the best performance of the trip, as we stepped out the door we were immediately drawn to a brass band playing on a corner, the crowd blocking all traffic, but the impromptu performance drawing out cameras and plenty of dancing. We stood in the street, watching and dancing with the crowd, while the police drove by to make an appearance, everyone showing vulnerable smiles for the powerful gang that stood on the street and blew. The night was unreal, or at least surreal in how it worked out; an emblem of how Elena and I work, how we both kind of just exist, allowing sounds and senses to guide us to exactly what we want, but try so hard all the time to explain.

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We took a cab back to the house. We stayed up for a little while but fell asleep easily. I woke up in the middle of the night ready to write about whatever thesis I’m planning on doing. But actually, this city, its sounds, its tastes, and its people make me sure about the necessity of what I’m doing. I’m not sure if I’ll do it here, but this place will play a big role in what this thing becomes. More specifi ally, my life in this place may become an essential part of the project.

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Site

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The site for an exercise of architectural destruction must be intimately personal in order to reach the depths of the architect or completely disconnected to avoid collateral damage or any opportunity for the project itself becoming personally confined.

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Origins Rooting a project in familiar territory is necessary for discovering the power and fragility of architectural ego. The sounds, smells, imagery, texture, people, and essence of the place will never be the same as before, what we knew when we were young, but in order to embed a project in any place the architect must egotistically assume responsibility for the changing future of the place and the necessary embodiment of the place in the project. The project must be all about the place, but run up against the place in order to push the place and the discipline forward. Bilbao was not only unprecedented but incredibly opposed to the image and identity of Bilbao at the time; the idea that the Guggenheim, the New-York- Guggenheim, would land in a strange, industrial town in Spain harbored the absurdity necessary to create an architecture that not only transformed the place into something inherently satisfying and absurdly appropriate, but shifted the discipline into a continued era of pursuit of perfect power: the search for architecture as world changing antidote. The origins of me lie on the coast in California, at the southern tip of a town called Cayucos. The initial site is the small plot of land where I grew up in a white stuccoed house with no garage, just up the hill, separated from the Pacific Ocean by the Pacific Coast Highway. The town is satisfyingly static, resisting erosion into the sea in a quietly funky state, yet constantly losing the majority of generations to LA or San Francisco just a few hours north or south. Yet the town resists erasure, disappearance impossible as many young metropolitans continue to call the place home, recalling the sometimes not-so-innocent youth spent on the beaches, in the streets, in the tavern, and deep in each others houses; each house an indelible and minutely precise influence on the futures and freedom of these scattered new lives. It is much more difficult to forget these pieces of inspiration

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in a haven of embedded individual spirit. Nick's window casting the cold June light on his mother's harp. The escape in Garrett's smoky chamber, his mother chain smoking in the living room of the 4 room apartment. The solitude of Brian's low one-story, wood house up Old Creek Road past where the asphalt ended. The shattered front window in the Christmas earthquake and the shaking doorway overlooking the rippling ocean. These things stay, but quietly. When we are reminded of our roots we find these remnants, the things we gather and call origins. Architecture seeks new origins constantly, the sort of origins that are not diagrammed or programmed, but the kind that lead to an intrinsic architecture, an architecture confi ent and free, risklessly risky and recklessly sure. In order to continue forward, one must be completely rooted, possibly out of fear but inevitably out of personal and egotistical necessity. Abstraction Memory is imperfect. Not only do we lose definition over time, memories tend to change, influenced by other pasts, presents, and futures. The objects we collect to make memory and origins permanent are inevitably abstracted to their most memorable form, and thus we are able to recognize the things that remind us of, well, home in a much broader sense that fits both our widening futures and the distance we face from memories decades ago. The ocean view in the warm Septembers becomes a sea of shattered glass viewed from a distance on our wood decks. The muscles on the pier are black fli kering static on the pylons we remember as splinters. We remember our greatest memories with utter clarity, but if we were to explain or, more importantly, draw our impressions of these original influences we realize that these memories are much more emotional, grounded in a very personal sense of place, time, people, and texture that cannot be explained without

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an abstracted clarity of experience. I'm sorry, I can't tell you exactly what July 2002 felt like, but I promise you it was salty, warm, exhausted, burning, fast, bright, sinking, loud, silent, smoky, and optimistic. How was yours? The Mundane The land of the mundane is a battlefield for the curious. In environments where not much is going on, the ground is fertile for the creation of anything, and especially, the most important things. Whether the big city causes an intimidation that dwarfs the discovery of new things, or the vacant landscape of the mundane is simply open for the experimentation of the untrained, the unseen, and the unheard-of, the mundane provides exactly the right amount of friction for the untrained artist to work. The suburbs of Southern California breed punk rock, in Seattle Kurt Cobain found Grunge, and in Detroit, Jack White reinvented or rediscovered a dirty sound in an otherwise clean era. At the beginning of a different century entirely, the porches of Delta Mississippi and Louisiana1 were the stage for musicians creating music straight from their emotional cores, an opposite sound of anything familiar to Americans of the day, but something so powerful in its untrained simplicity and personal and cultural depth that it transcended music and found its way into a position of historical and cultural monumentality still performed today. New widespread mundanity is caused by a sense that nothing is new, or has the possibility of being new because of the ease of discovery of anything slightly provocative and its immediate conception, causing the retardation of whatever moment of experimentation is about to happen, or the unabashed replication of whatever sound, style, or architectural iconography is in its infancy. By definition the mundane leads to boredom 1 The Blues. Prod. Martin Scorsese. PBS, 2003.

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through an extreme sense of normality, so suddenly in a contemporary society, the most exciting places become mundane: the top of the Empire State Building, the Great Wall of China, and Yosemite Valley. Architectural academic institutes are harvesters of the mundane. The normality that saturates schools in a modern attempt at not necessarily copying, but mimicking good locking things leads to a white out of any architectural ideas of purpose. The most controversial projects are praised in a sea of normality as a landfall on an interesting yet isolated island. Provocation in the design realm is dwindling, while the possibility of finding a provocative architect who explores his or her craft not for antiestablishment or anti-norm reasons, but is innately curious and irrevocably irresponsible seems nearly impossible from a quick glance. Institutions and the profession as a whole are (somewhat) understandably tied by client, financial, and pedagogical restraints that lead to a graying out of architectural hues, but when we recall the rural and urban mundane as the environments where the blues were founded, Morphosis and Gehry experimented in the 70â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and 80â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s2, and where cult and religion reign heavy, we find that the greatest potential for a return to powerful, human, sublime architecture fueled by pure human ego and curiosity, but lacking the arrogance that leads to this grayness; art and architecture found in the true, rich, and beautiful mundanity of suburban Los Angeles, garage studios on Long Island, and the porch living rooms of Biloxi Mississippi and New Orleans.

2 Gehry, Frank O., Fernando MaĚ rquez Cecilia, and Richard C. Levene. Frank Gehry, 19872003. Madrid: El Croquis Editorial, 2006. Print.

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Cayucos A miniature town on the coast of California, and my hometown, Cayucos is the most personal option for site. With no real political, social, or ideological friction surrounding the town, the reason for site selection is strictly to create something in a place that I am intimately familiar with, allowing an extreme focus on the architecture of personal fragility and an honest exploration of ego and arrogance with the potential for architecture that is all about the town and myself at the same time. An architectural proposal in Cayucos will cause controversy in a town without much change for 50 years, and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not sure if that controversy is productive or harmful to the progression of a more personal architecture. Founded in the mid-1800â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the city grew slowly over time, in the beginning as a port half way between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and throughout the 1900â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s as a quiet escape from the bigger cities on the west coast. The population has hovered around 2500 people for the last 40 years as most of the available land is taken up and there is no local effort to grow the city. My experience with the place is incredibly deep, spending more than a decade of my childhood years living on the south end of the two mile long town. There are moments of this childhood locked in every corner and this will either allow for an intimate architecture within the confines of memory and familiarity or will prove too dangerously close to home to be productive. Perhaps the greatest advantage to such a site is a neutral project will be absolutely impossible. But at the same time, the most successful project may be completely anti-neutral in a totally neutral place.

Southern end of Cayucos >

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For the purposes of this project, Cayucos is a site of networked experiences: the network, my timeline, the experiences, my own. The project is personal for every user (the client) and I am inviting them to experience how I know best to reignite the will for architecture. The choice is egotistical and selfless; the arrogance of saying I can change the place in a way that will become endemic, the selflessness in my willingness to do so, change myself, and invite people in. At its core, the project is about origins and the original in relation to the power of ego, and this place is the only place I know where to explore and exploit that. The town hugs the coast from north to south. All commerce takes place at the north end of town where the pier once hosted a bustling seaport but now stands quiet as a fishing armature and romantic nighttime strollway. The beach along the Pacific Ocean is unusually sandy and attracts many visitors from Central California during the summer, but in winter time is one of the most vacant accessible beaches along California's southern coast. Four different creeks spring from the hills and terminate in micro deltas at the sea, the largest of which fl ws from Whale Rock reservoir, a large hidden lake to the north-east of the town. Pacific Coast Highway, a historical tendon connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco bisects the town longitudinally, separating north from south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west from the fertile and productive rolling hills to the east. Old Creek Road is the only thruway east, connecting to Paso Robles and highway 46 leading past James Dean's death site towards Fresno and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

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*See enlarged map on next page

Skimboarding was mostly about running, sprinting actually, in the inch deep water left behind by surging waves. We would glide on that sheet at full speed for hundreds of yards before doing it again and again and again. We watched Nick's jawbreaker fall and pick up speed as it rolled down the steep hill and across Old Creek Road. A quick wash and his candy pursuit was back. Old Creek Football (see page 241) The rapids came every winter, rushing brown water gushing from the hills. We couldn't do much except sit, stare, and listen from the bridge or the rocks, because we knew there was real danger in that moment. The first trip out with the ka ak was completely unrelaxing as what seemed like a completely calm ocean from the shore turned out to be a tumbling plane of cold, black, water as I felt like I was going nowhere on the yellow, plastic, boat.

Naked city sort of map with micro sites (maybe include cad)... arrows/dots and lines pointing to each micro site and one or two sentence story about each

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The concrete spillway at Whale Rock Dam was almost always dry, but before the drought, when it would rain, I only imagined the world's largest freefall waterslide. Fishing was only allowed on the corner of public land at quiet Whale Rock. We never caught more than bluegill.

I always dreaded the hill: long, empty, not so steep, but torturous. Afterwards was always a moment of ecstatic relief... it was all downhill from there. Concrete coffin piles sat hauntin ly in the corner of the cemetery; the corner that separated my bike path from north and south Cayucos. I heard so many stories of a glorious, secret, hilly, grassy, mountaintop golf course but never actually went there. Top of the World is the highest point in Cayucos and the short but desolate hike to the top always provided a breathtaking escape from the laid back town at the bottom. Everyone has their escape, this was mine, almost always alone, perched above the town, no paved streets and homes, the view swept from south (Montana de Oro) to the north end of town. Home is at the south end of Cayucos. My jumping off point to everything else and my sanctuary when I didn't want to jump. Learning to drive was easy on the long, straight strip of Villa Creek Rd. It was quiet unlike the highways and roads, and we could take the windows off the jeep. Running along the bluffs was boring after awhile (repetition), but later I realized the immaculate boredom of dusk ocean filte ed by tall, speeding grass led me to think about some of the greater things in my future.

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Cayucos Creek Road is solemn adult territory, just separated from the town where Marcus jumped and I sped down the straightaway late at night in the Jeep. Easter Eggs were the only reason to ever cross the creek, and the only reason we ever saw the field with abandoned cars and the water tower.

Flea Market (see next page) Bridging (see page 239)

I had never walked along the bluffs at night, but after spending a night at the Tavern, the spinning stars and crashing waves penetrating the silence of pitch blackness held me in passionate comfort until we got back to the ranch.

Rock climbing along the tidepools always offered a jagged trek past the limits of tourists and towards Stevie's Bay where we felt like isolated adults for a second. The Pier is kind of where anything can happen, the romantic beacon of the town seen on t-shirts and stickers. But for those related to the wooden armature, it's more associated with midnight surf jumps, foggy fishing night , and chilly walks to the end for no reason.

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School is a world in itself. The field known for the annual and anxiety ridden track meet, the auditorium for the dances and plays, and the playgrounds established as named figu es in the cumulative histories of the place.

Monarch butterflies in ested the unnamed creek that ran through town in one especially lush area, so thick the trees moved in hushed orange and black flutter . Quarry Hills always looked dangerous, dirtbike trails scarring the lush, brown landscape only accessible by the end of Cayucos Dr., past the locked metal gate.

Above the piece of land I always imagined building my dream house was a wide dirt road that doubled as the starting gate for dirt-bikers and the lonesome and romantic grandstand for 4th of July fi eworks.

Hole in the Sand (see page 236)

Lying in the streets at night was more a violent expression of freedom than a daring experiment in traffic

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Every holiday was marked by a Flea Market along the banks of Cayucos Creek by the Tennis Courts. Otherwise, the field stood empty, dead grass demarcating the paths of temporary street fairs, offering a not-so-shortcut to school from downtown.

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Hole In the Sand Fries make the best seagull bait. The grease soaks through the white paper bag that Skippers packages full of the heavy, greasy, fried sticks. Usually undercooked but always hot, perfect for a sample before we dug. After the recent storms driftwood laid scattered on the now-serene beach, the pier refl cting on the post-storm, glassy bay. Nick usually began digging as I scavenged for damaged plywood sheets, and the bigger washed up tree parts. The best, most whole pieces usually found their way to the cracks between the tidebreaker rocks at the end of the creeks that came from the hills. My summer-trained bare feet made it easy to climb around finding the most normal, flat boards for the roo of our hole. I could only carry a few bigger pieces at a time, and each trip I had to wander farther and farther to find boards that would work at all. Once the hole was two or three feet deep we built the roof. Usually it was topped by one or two large pieces, the holes in the roof covered by smaller, stickier pieces, and the edges camoufla ed seamlessly with sand built up over the ends of the red, brown, and gray sticks and boards. We always left a little space to crawl in, but usually we just slipped under the biggest board into the hole. Comfortably reclining in our sand easy-chairs, we threw handfuls of sand on the roof to really blend in with the beach, and finall , poked a small hole in the middle. Armed with the now-cold bag of fries we sat in dark silence, the sound of the waves muffled by the sand, transporting us to the underworld that we were now experts at building. Through the hole in the middle of the roof we threw a few fries and waited. Less than a minute passed before the seagulls came crashing down onto our roof and we laughed for hours

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at our secrecy and the comical aggression inherent to the predatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s will to survive. The force of the diving birds broke through the boards and streams of light shot into our hole like freshly pierced bullet holes. It was a deep sense of security and safety, sitting in the darkness, inches from the mayhem above; a quiet world underneath one layer of rough, weathered, driftwood we were far from everything familiar and we could hear everything above. The waves relentlessly crashed in muted familiarity between kamikaze seagull attacks. For us, it was a joke, the anti-tourist interaction with the local nature, but for the birds it was a fight that we laughed all the way through, until our stomachs hurt, and we looked for the next thing to build. Bridging We werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t unfamiliar with anyplace in town. We knew what the north end of the beach looked like, even though it took effort and a little bit of pain to get there. Storms, however, changed the town for us. The pounding rain and the swelling sea slurped the creeks out of their hillside sanctuaries and caused an ebb and fl w of flooding slicing the beach into quadrants with temporary rivers as the fissure between parts. During the storm, creeks fl wed violently into the ocean, sometimes 40 feet wide creating a massive brown sauce racing over humps in the sand caused by the sudden rush of water from inland. The water was a much different tone than the still reflect ve pools left behind after springtime. Instead, the brown riptide carrying artifacts from the ranches inland screamed danger to us in an uncontrolled voice of the power of nature that we lusted for as curious weekenders. Suddenly it was our duty to bridge to other territories, reconquering the land that was already rightfully ours.

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We bridged for days, fishing for pieces of stray driftwood floating downstream from the ranches, broken fences, and old trees in the hills. Rocks were easy to come by, scattered along the edges of the beach, never taken for souvenirs but perfect for the base structure of the bridges that would take us from one beach to another. Three or four, large enough to resist the will to tumble into the ocean, were placed equidistant from each other based on the dimensions of the wood we had scavenged. Once those were in place we began with the larger boards that would give the minimum span allowing us to make it across the river through a series of well timed and well placed jumps. A couple more larger pieces and we had our base; the rest of the wood was used for design and safety precautions in case one of the larger boards was swept away during a surge in the storm. The testing process took up most of the time. Though we put a lot of thought into to point connections between the boards and the stones, the river, many times, proved too powerful for the unfastened connections and much of our time was spent chasing boards towards the waves, racing the river before the actual riptide stole out materials. Eventually, however, things stayed and our success in crossing over one river led to another challenge of the next river a few steps down the beach, until our network of driftwood bridges created a web of planked stitches that only we knew the pattern to. Darkness came early during winter, so by late afternoon we were already home. The next day we were never disappointed to see our bridges in shambles, only the largest rocks and boards remaining. Instead we took pride that anything remained at all, like the timelessness of a ruin that remains after the weathering of millenia, the remnants of the day before left us mesmerized that we created anything with permanence at all, and we built again.

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Old Creek Football Waist high weeds and browning waves of green grass. The field was simple and we established the boundary lines with sweaters and backpacks. The grassy field just off of Old Creek Road was our town square; the central meeting place for the south end kids, south of the cemetery and the abandoned water reclamation facility at the end of the creek that fl wed from Whale Rock Reservoir. We played football after school, fi e or ten of us depending on who was let out each afternoon and who was taking the bus (which was faster than walking). The teams were usually divided based on the basketball teams chosen earlier in the day on the blacktop, with a few changes, and no girls, though my sister played a couple times. The ball was the most important decision to make, some of us purists preferred a high school sized pigskin while others wanted a less realistic Nerf ball that screamed through the air. It was usually tackle, 4 on 4 or so. The sparse noise from the highway fragmented the sound of waves, and provided a soundtrack to the afternoon game. The lot was only bordered by a wood fence on one side, otherwise it was open to streets on the east and the west, and an old gas station, converted to something new every year (garage, art gallery, antique store, etc) to the south. With only four per team the game was spread out, but we were agile and fast. The grass was a mirage of softness, waist high blades only serving to slow the runners and lead to the twisting a few ankles from hidden gopher holes. Any tackles were made essentially on hard dirt until the grass was matted enough from our hours of chasing each other to provide a slight cushion for downs. The setting sun ended every game as it drooped slowly across the highway, over the ocean. We payed no attention to the gently incredible Pollock sky, streaking with purples, oranges, and

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reds diced by deep blue and white clouds that lingered from earlier; we just played until the ball was lost in the deep purple sky, or someone got hurt and the teams became uneven. I received my first concussion on that field; a tackle that I faced head on against the guy who always beat me in the mile. I was knocked backwards, holding onto the ball, but hitting my head against the hard ground below the grass. Everything shook as I felt a moment of calm euphoria wash over as I lay in the grass, looking up at the sky needled by the tips of green and brown rising like a forest above the meadow of my head, in silence, before everyone came over to find out what happened. I was in the next play and eventually learned how to get hit. Football is different than most sports in its timing. The huddling before every play allows one to stop for a second and find where they are. In these moments that field became an important landmark in my memory of space; the freedom of the nature-scaled lawn, contained within the restraints of the town that I knew too well, allowed me to practice my limits: go as fast as I could, run as far for a pass as our 5th grade arms threw, and argue endlessly about the physical boundaries we set for each other. We were satisfie , only for a moment, that we found freedom on our own terms, on our own turf, the only rules being the limits of the field itself. But those limits played an incredibly important role in the shape of our physical childhood experimentation. The field remained vacant of buildings the entirety of my childhood, randomly adopting a truck or trailer for a few months at a time, but always growing tall in the spring, taunting us to return even after we had moved on to different field , homes, friends, and games.

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What happens when the town changes? When something is different? Can the architecture, the ego, exist as a new thing that is all about the place?

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Architecture

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Powerful architecture is built by those who never give up their ego; who are able to go so deep into themselves and into a place where the result moves past them into the realm of the universal. Architects must be able to see the potential, the extremes, the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, the other side of something, even in the most familiar place to them: home. This is how the undue degree of self worth applied indiscriminatingly to architects is dismissed. For Gehry and Corbusier, the ability to make architecture fit inherently and perfectly to a place, and the potential to do so in seemingly infinite ways, is what leads to an architecture that moves forward. This is personal, I need to get beyond my experience, my view, and my view of Cayucos. I need to love and destroy it; move on and get deeper. The project is a house for myself. I must embed myself in the place, though I must leave. It must be an architecture that is all about Cayucos at the same time completely up against it. To think you know a place inside and out means you've blinded yourself to the past, present, and future of that place; the potential of a forward architecture dwindles in a fog of familiarity and arrogant satisfaction of one's understanding of everything they know. Architecture is about something much more inherent than the precious perfect object that exists in an instance once; it's about an architecture that can exist in an infinite number of ways in the same form. If the client was unhappy about Le Corbusier's ramp, he would've still done it, in a way that perfectly satisfied the client. Ego is the power to convince the client without ever sacrificing the architecture inherent to a project; to be able to do it six different ways and risk oneself completely. Arrogance is what follows the one who holds that power.

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Nothing (Famous) If I remove everything I intimately know about a place I am in the position to create what belongs in a place without knowing it at all. What are we left with when our symbols of architectural promise become empty? When they are considered only in their respective moments of implementation or installation; if Bilbao is only seen within its temporal context and not within the context of the thousands of normal visitors it experiences every day? Not that the ego is necessarily removed but to begin the process of an architecture a little further out, everything familiar is recognized and obsessed over until it shatters, providing one with the specific remnants of impressions made by the signature work, but only as outlines to the next move forward. Not only fun, but important, to delete the most important images of stagnant architectural discipline leads to freedom unfamiliar since the moment of modernist rebellion. When nothing is famous, nothing needs proving; everyone finds their hance.

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Everything (Familiar) We obsess over origins as the basis for results. One's upbringing leads to a predictable future, and we see the results of childhood in everything that follows. The architect that retains the ability to remain a child in experimental design escapes the mold of predictability, though not the threat of the signature. What if we leave our most influential moments empty while retaining their influence? We relieve ourselves of crippling past and simulation addiction. A literal removal of the ego, the "I," and discovering the potential of such lusciously free space; a space built from a new, dynamic, untouchable architecture.

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Remove what we know and we are left with something uncannily new and familiar.

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A new terrain where architecture is free, origins embedded, allowing the ego to play.

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Project Title:

Ego: The Architecture of Freedom Statement: Ego is freedom. Arrogance is imprisonment; a self-imposed captivity in a signature. Architecture is about discovering an intrinsic human sound that pierces contemporary architectural white noise desperate for listeners. The discipline now begs for a fragile architecture, personal to a point that makes things slightly off-disciplinary, and so deep into the architect themselves that it becomes universal. Personal origins unground the visionary, make possible the untouchable, and give a start to new disciplines. An architecture so egotistical, so deeply about myself, that it becomes universally engaging. Challenging for everyone. A love for architecture lies in the egotistically selfless; an architect (an architecture) that projects the signature of a childish necessity to create. The architectural project is rooted at the origins (home), between the cliffs and the hill, between the inherently personal will of one and the cold, vacuous weight of the many; at the intimate intersection of the powerful ego (self) and the one we desperately want to satisfy, who we know we never will.

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The program begins as a house for myself.

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Here

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The site is a moment in the town, steps from gone; an egotistical locus of one person with the greatest potential for a project that selflessly changes an immovable place.

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First House At the southern tip of town is a house that everyone knows, solid and tall like the rocks out to sea on the northern shore, with pylons leading up to a shack floating in the sky. It is a sort of cenotaph, deeply embedded in the fabric of the town but solid and reclusive; obvious and insular, it projects the ego in form and composition, but it is an ego that cannot be touched. It is one man's monument to his hometown and, at the same time, his escape from it. It signifies that he is al ays here, even when he is away. It grows out of the structure of the original house on the site, a towering lighthouse with one entry that can be seen for miles. The shack that floats above the stalwart rock displays the life of the man who lives inside, though nobody else can reach it. The house is his hiding place; his chamber, and his instrument telling us that he is not only from here, but he is an integral part of here. The architecture is new and permanent. It is a house that recalls and projects the most familiar aspects about the place: the rocks, the pier, the driftwood, the balconies, the caverns... but in a completely foreign way. The citizens are still unsure what they think of the place. Some enjoy it's unique stature, the children tell stories of finding their way to the stilts, while others indefinite y sneer at the thing. The man who lives there enjoys the mystery surrounding his landlocked lighthouse, but many times questions whether he has really isolated himself in the place that cultivated his freedom in the first place. As he escapes to the shack that everyone can see but only he can reach, his perch seems distant, a monumental architecture as permanent as the rock it grew out of and as quiet as the ego he cherishes deep down in fear of his beckoning childish curiosity.

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First House elevations

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Second House Most people call it The Crab, even though to many now, it's simply known as the House. I mean, what other house could they be talking about? The man who built it was searching for liberation; freedom in his origins through a very egotistical architecture. He sits out on the decks some days for hours, his tiny self as much a part of the architecture as the rough steel legs and the amorphous thing on top. The legs allow the thing to float without really affecting the ground of Cayucos as it crawls above the structure of his old home. He is the only one who knows how to get up there and once he is, it's a game of hide and show. Though the house is always on display for miles around he hides in the shell for most of the day. The balconies are very Cayucos at the intersection of the familiarly natural (the amorphous rock that recalls the moments of tumultuous earth piercing the ocean plane) and the endemically architectural (the balconies seen on almost every home overlooking the ocean). But these balconies have no specific orientation, they look over the whole town and provide him an escape whenever he tires of spending his time indoors. It is a display of his ego and a symbol of the fragility of ego itself. Perched high atop the legs that allow him to float above everything he is on display whether he is hiding or not. It is an escape and a prison, an architecture of solitude and overwhelming sociality; an immediate relationship with everyone and only himself at once as he exposes himself to everything he once knew in a place that is as new as he is.

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Second House elevations

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Third House The complete and internally unrecognizable ego is the collision of all moments of formation and bending of the ego in place. Not a collection, but a fusion of the pieces that make up a person is accumulated over time and always changing, thus the house that says "thank you" to those who have created this momentary ego is also an immediate fossil of an egotistical equation. This house is the collision of the architectural-emotional foundations and forms of the houses that shaped my path through the town. Essentialized interpretations (that call back elements of the nonindexable, architectures that leave longer than infinite momentary impressions) of each home (friends, relatives, singular memories) are compiled in a new formation (totalized); completely free in most organizational methods but anchored in the city in the essence of the collection, in the fact that the new house is purely compiled of the essences of key homes in the town. It is a distillation of the most important fragments in what is already a tiny place, the orientation of windows, roofs, and architectures preserved in an otherwise playful process. But the house suffers from architectural insularity, a solipsists retreat that through this personal defragmentation becomes even less approachable than the person themselves. While the embedding of the architecture through memory and recollection does provide the weight necessary for the free ego to exist in such a place, a totalized chamber of memory yields a defensive result and the house becomes less of a beacon signaling safe and familiar new harbor, and more of a fortress defended by a new unfamiliarity that only the occupant egotistically understands.

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The third house is about a new familiar; an architecture composed of abstracted architectures of influence as a child which embeds itself in the town while becoming a completely new thing. >

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{ The house is composed of the essences of Cayucos as I know and have become it. But in this essentialized place I experience everything in a foreign way, The house is so embedded in the town that it stands above it. }

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Sections of new composition of a house for myself based on the architectural memories of the houses of others in the town.

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By simply removing stuffy architectural articulation, like in the section below, the generative memory sensorial elements take on new architectural potential hinting at the fragile architecture necessary for a house for oneself to become a house for a place; a house for the architecture of architecture.

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Fourth House The shell thickens and though penetrated by the architectural objects of the town, the occupant hides even farther away in a monolithic crab shell. It is a moment where the embedded architectures of the third house are cracked, but left in tact, hinting at exposure but resulting in reclusiveness. This is not a place to hide, but a moment where the house must be unafraid to embed itself but potentially shatter into a million pieces. Nothing is gently assimilated into Cayucos. The most embedded moments of the town are weathered in, rusted through, in a time told vernacular. But the survival of loved things here is not violent, it is passionate, an aggravation of love and a result of desire. At a certain age we all feared we would get stuck here, because so many things had. The stories I tell are some of those things, locked into the memory of a place that progresses with the life and death of its people; rusted tractors in the alternating golden and army green hills, the poker room in the tavern seeing the semi-annual Texas Hold-em match but usually lying dormant, the rotting pier pylons, and the cracking country roads. The natural objects are perhaps the most comfortable: rocks standing stalwartly tall in the shallow sandy ocean, the overgrown bluffs with pencil thin trails winding through gopher holes and old foundations, the ancient trees we forgot as kids. Architecture happily avoids any potential embedding into the town, new vacation homes built cheaply in less than a year and old stuccoed shacks lying unchanged except a controversial paint change from time to time. This project, however, faces the necessity to embed itself in the town in a way that is both fragile and permanent: a combination of the rusting tractors and the unmoving rocky landmarks. It must be a thing that lives and dies with the city, infinitely in both directions.

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Rooms

{

/Program

A Place to Store My Models Kitchen for Snacks View Room Linoleum Dining Room Wes Anderson Memorial Movie Den Unusually Hot Sun Deck The Marshall Ford Gallery of Amateur Modern Art Manifesto Chamber Whiskey Den Ping Pong Arena Nostalgic Artifacts Depository Sand Rinse Shower The Lounge to Be Critical In Watch Gallery Jacuzzi Spa Pool Tower Bath Room Crows Nest The Quiet Chamber with a Window Muddy Back Yard Pitch Black Reality TV Theater Skimboard Storage Film Vault The $1000 Bottle Fridge Running Spikes Gallery Sweatshirt Closet Kayak Rack Half Rink (for hockey) Slingshot Range My Bed Cask

Misc Closet The Cayucans Performance Hall Taco Kitchen Digital Escape Den Sunset Pariscope Loft Sun Drenched Sun Sauna Dusty MEP Attic Digital Repetition Recording Studio Driftwood Collection and Display Greeting Foyer Piano Room Mom’s Vacation House Dad’s Tool Room Amanda’s Yellow Room Fireworks Roof BBQ Galley Fourth of July Room / Museum Guest Bedroom Fog Observatory Mom's Library Dad's Theater with the Big Chairs Guest Kids Bedroom The Adirondack Deck Auto-Americana Shop Christmas Tree and Couches Room Inflatable Super B wl Party Room The Basketball Hoop Out Front

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This house also invites people in. An endearing mystery that is indelibly linked to the people and imagery, the result of the previous abstractions, of the place. This is done through another level of abstraction: stairs, a crucial fragment of micro-urban fabric in the town, the only connection between public streets and the natural shore below, at specific moments along the beach, each beginning with a narrow winding path between homes, wood steps lead down to a formidable concrete landing of 4 or 5 stairs.

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Plan of somewhere in the middle of House 4

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Piano Room Sunburn Deck Tower Bath Room

The Quiet Chamber with a Window

Greeting Foyer

Guest Bedroom

Wes Anderson Memorial Film Den

Amandaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Yellow Room

Sand Shower

The Lounge to Be Critical In

The section exposes an inviting exploratorum of ego on display; rooms meant as public become private, and spaces designated as private now appear public as the architecture breaks, invites, fossilizes, and opens.

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Fireworks Roof

Momâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vacation House Fog Observatory

The Marshall Ford Gallery of Amateur Contemporary Art

View Room BBQ Galley

Whiskey Den

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In each room the details of the weathering architectural processes are evident, and serve to further connect the house to the place.

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Sunset view from Shearer Ave.

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Fifth House shatters in bright metallic splinters, its dense collection scattered across the town in a dissolving signature of myself. Monumentalism disintegrates into a surreal and uncanny experience in a deeply familiar place, splinters crack the calcified t wn with the ego to change everything. Small, microscopic, clandestine but selfles , intrinsically Built off need, an architecture of pieces, an architecture of the whole. Nothing for miles. Look at that house! We are here! Obviously. You're thirsty, take a drink. You're tired, sit. You've reached the end, lock up, move on. Sundown, light up. Go ahead, jump. It's quiet, let's stay here. My house is your house. Welcome home. I give what I always wanted. It takes time to find, time to let o, time to come back. Rust, weeds, salt, nothing. But wait, there. There! Of course. Find me running along bluffs climbing the hill riding north anchored at sea buried in sand aloft with butterflie . Home is nothing without me. Home is nothing really. I may never be ready

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to return but when I do I will be there. Everywhere. Ego is freedom. Arrogance is captivity. The sand washes away from the pylons sinking deep into the beyond sand sucking gulps of salt fizz ba k and forth until the crabs scurry plummet. I can feel them under the sand, the crawling and biting essence of the land here that stubbornly changes around those who stay redefined ernacular defined y an undefined interactula spectacular uncomfortable uncomfortable singular multiples multiple nonsensical sensicatlities a drinking fountain, a shower, a bike rack, a diving board, a lightpost bleachers, a lighthouse, a bed, a buoy, sprinklers, a dock, a cannon one thing, one thing, one thing, one thing, one thing, the whole thing non-incomplete-complete the selfless e otist the arrogant humanist the architectural riskiness the necessary assuredness the practical absurdist I'm uncomfortable with making one thing; a collection of uncomfortabilities. The precise abstraction of singular me

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non folly ~ the foolish pragmatic moment ~ Origins place architecture at the core of love Love guides architecture in the act of ego Ego frees architecture from ourselves We are architecture that speaks all for you ~ non precious non nostalgic non ruin embedded with meaning but finally free of it

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Moments

{

/Program

Running Bluffs Drinking Fountain Nikki's Ranch Waterslide Cayucos Creek Beach Bridge Old Creek Football Arena Bench North Cayucos Lighthouse The Pier Diving Board Top of the World Tower North Bluffs Bike Rack Butterfly Micro elescope F Street Shower (so we can wash off after skimboarding) Ash Street Bed (so I can lay down in the street) VIP 4th of July Parade Bleachers Rain Island in Old Creek Rapids Volleyball Lights at 24th Street Seagull Fries Pit Empty Lot Handball Wall (Ocean and D Streets) Whale Rock Dock Look Out Telescope School to Pool Slide Kayak Bouey Toro Creek Turnaround (learning to drive) Top of the Rock Hot Spring Swap Meet Forum Next Submarine Attack Defense Cannon **Sprinkler Fountains for the Vines by the Cemetery Gateway Bells The Kick the Can Can Picnic Table Somewhere Warehouse for the Upkeep of these Objects and the Collection of New Ones

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To the south I run alone; past the limits I know, past exhaustion and wind, past the heat and the salt. I never see anyone, I'm not looking. Dry, dusty, liberation in a moment of bare human needs. I drink. ~ To F Street. Blistered, triumphantly exhausted, the cool and heavy flow of water readies us for the night. I rinse. ~ To the north, we go by bike. Just outside town waves crash harder along untouched cliffs. The end of civilization as we know it. I park. I stop for a moment and breath. Then I go on. ~ To the tip of the pier I never jump. I watch the invisible limits of lawful society shatter as they do, off the beam, going under for an eternal second, engulfed in the chill of frigid summer sea. Post to post to post to post until finally it's just me, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiI jump. ~ To 24th Street, vast, flat, an arena. The sun dives, a misty light illuminates where none has before. We play. ~ To the cemetery, nobody remembers the vines by the highway we planted, they're just part of the town, surviving, pink and green at the edge of the sand and the highway on that rusty fence, watered by the strange fountains growing out of the weeds. I survive. ~ To Ash, the hill behind the Tavern. Feeling the town is easy when it's empty and the roads are quiet, calling for me to lie down. I am finally part of it. I sleep.

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To Old Creek; the green grass and the blue wind, the field opens up as an arena, abandoned and ready for football. We fight. ~ To the Top of the World, summit of the coastal range, following a path tread by hang gliders, the trail gets shorter with time. The town unfolds along the foothills below and the ocean keeps the Pacific edge clean along the shore. The air is different up here. I fly. ~ To the sea, a plastic boat carries me to the calm only found within the solitude of unlimited blue glass. I anchor. ~ To Whale Rock Reservoir, forgotten in the hills behind the town, inaccessible since the early 90's. A dock is quietly installed on the south shore, and suddenly, from time to time, the flicker of an aluminum fishing boat bobs back and forth optimistically in the distance as I sit on the edge and I fish. ~ To World War II, an oil tanker is sunk by a Japanese submarine just off the coast, the sound of explosions echoing through the night streets and valleys. Everyone survives, the story becomes almost legend amongst locals, and defenses are put in place and, I protect. ~ To White Rock, a mile past the tip of the pier, hiding just under the surface causing the water, teeming with sharks, to swell above with every set of waves. The lighthouse provides beacon and shelter, a mystery everyone is fond of but only I know.

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Running Bluffs Drinking Fountain To the south I run alone; past the limits I know, past the exhaustion and wind, past the heat and the salt. I never see anyone but I'm not looking. Dry, dusty, liberation in a moment of bare human needs. I drink.

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F Street Shower To F Street. Blistered, triumphantly exhausted, the cool and heavy flow of water readies us for the night. I rinse.

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North Cliffs Bike Rack To the north we go by bike. Just outside town waves crash harder along untouched cliffs. The end of civilization as we know it. I park. I stop for a moment and breath. Then I go on.

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Pier Diving Board To the tip of the pier I never jump. I watch the invisible limits of lawful society shatter as they do, off the beam, going under for an eternal second, engulfed in the chill of frigid summer sea. Post to post to post to post until finally it's just me, iiiiiiiiiiiiiiI jump.

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24th Street Volleyball Lights To 24th Street, vast, flat, an arena. The sun dives, a misty light illuminates where none has before. We play.

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Football To Old Creek; the green grass and the blue wind, the field opens up as an arena, abandoned and ready for football. We fight.

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Top of the World To the Top of the World, summit of the coastal range, following a path tread by hang gliders, the trail gets shorter with time. The town unfolds along the foothills below and the ocean keeps the Pacific edge clean along the shore. The air is different up here. I fly.

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Kayak Buoy To the sea, a plastic boat carries me to the calm only found within the solitude of unlimited blue glass. I anchor.

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Next Submarine Attack Defense Cannon To World War II, an oil tanker is sunk by a Japanese submarine just off the coast, the sound of explosions echoing through the night streets and valleys. Everyone survives, the story becomes almost legend amongst locals, and defenses are put in place and, I protect.

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White Rock Lighthouse To White Rock, a mile past the tip of the pier, hiding just under the surface causing the water, teeming with sharks, to swell above with every set of waves. The lighthouse provides beacon and shelter, a mystery everyone is fond of but only I know.

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A Town

goes deep past me past origins past ego to liberation to freedom to a universal architecture idiosyncratically engaging universally challenging for me completely for everyone completely a place I've never known and never will but stands infinitely accessible to all those who find it, built from the moments of disintegrated monumentality shiny metallic splinters of everything that is me The deeper I go Relentlessly me Relentlessly unfamiliar, uncomfortable, new Relentlessly me a shattered ego, intact in a town, a town for myself.

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A Fragile Architecture The final design project is a town for myself. The fourth house shatters and the splintered pieces are reclaimed as a new vernacular of pieces in Cayucos based on what I've always wanted there (the drinking fountain, etc, from previous pages). This is pushed beyond recognition as the pieces transform, grow, shrink, evolve, and architecturalize into new moments in a town for myself; a result of pushing my ideas, my ego, to a moment of liberation towards a universal level of architectural engagement.

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Bibliography

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Feist, Gregory J., and Frank X. Barron. "Predicting Creativity from Early to Late Adulthood: Intellect, Potential, and Personality." Journal of Research in Personality 37.2 (2003): 62-88. Ferry, Jean. The Conductor and Other Tales. Trans. Edward Gauvin. Cambridge, MA: Wakefield, 2013. Print Feuerman, William. "Sublime Design: Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye." The Conversation. N.p., 3 June 2014. Web. Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. London: Verso, 2011. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. New York: Norton, 1962. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print. Friedman, Mildred S., and Michael Sorkin. Gehry Talks: Architecture Process. New York: Rizzoli, 1999. Print. Gehry, Frank O., Fernando Márquez Cecilia, and Richard C. Levene. Frank Gehry, 19872003. Madrid: El Croquis Editorial, 2006. Print. Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Physical Genius." The New Yorker. N.p., 2 Aug. 1999. Web. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/08/02/the-physical-genius>. Goldberger, Paul. Building up and Tearing Down: Reflections on the A e of Architecture. New York: Monacelli, 2009. Gopnik, Blake. “Design Diva Hits a High Z.” Newsweek. 21 Sept. 2011. Greenberg, Jan, and Sandra Jordan. Frank O. Gehry: Outside in. New York: DK Ink, 2000. Print. Grosz, Elizabeth, and Peter Eisenman. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridg, MA: MIT, 2001. Hawthorne, Christopher. “Bulldoze First, Apologize Later: A True L.A. Landmark.” Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 16 Jan. 2015. Web. Ingels, Bjarke. Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution. Köln: Evergreen, 2010. Print. Jacobs, Tom. "The Focused Arrogance of the Highly Creative." Pacific Standard. .p., 7 July 2011. Web. <http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/the-focused-arrogance-of-thehighly-creative-33512>. James, William. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking . Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975. Print.

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Jencks, Charles, and Karl Kropf. Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture. Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy, 2006. Print. Kahn, Louis I., and Alessandra Latour. Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1991. Koolhaas, Rem, and Véronique Patteeuw. Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: What Is OMA. Rotterdam: NAi, 2003 Krečič, Peter, and Jože Plečnik. Plečnik, the Complete Works. New York, NY: Whitney Library of Design, 1993. Print. Kroll, Andrew. "AD Classics: Igualada Cemetery / Enric Miralles & Carme Pinos" 13 Jan 2011. ArchDaily. <http://www.archdaily.com/?p=103839> Leach, Neil. Camoufla e. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT, 2006. Lomholt, I. "Hotel Puerta America, Photos – Madrid." Earchitect RSS. 15 June 2005. Web. <http://www.e-architect.co.uk/madrid/hotel-puerta-america>. Macarthur, John. "The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics." Assemblage No. 32 (1997): 126-41. JSTOR. Web. Martin, Reinhold. Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2010. Print. McCarter, Robert, and Juhani Pallasmaa. Understanding Architecture. London: Phaidon, 2012. Print. McGuigan, Cathleen. "Everyone Will Want A Bilbao." Newsweek 31 Dec. 1999: Web. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Signet Classic, New American Lib, 1980. Print. Miralles, Enric. Enric Miralles, 1983-2000: Mental Maps and Social Landscapes = Mapas Mentales Y Paisajes Sociales. El Escorial, Madrid: Croquis Editorial, 2002. Print. Miura, Masayuki. "Ise Shrine." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 12 Apr. 2015. <http://www.oxfordartonline.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/ subscriber/article/grove/art/T041695>. Moneo, José Rafael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies In the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2004. Moore, Rowan. "Peter Zumthor: In Pursuit of Perfection." The Guardian. 18 June 2011. Web. <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/jun/19/peter-zumthor-serpentinegallery-pavilion>.

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Morley, Simon. The Sublime. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. Murray, Christine. "Peter Zumthor: 'My Work Is Not about Design'" Architect's Journal. 2 June 2011. Web. <http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/daily-news/peter-zumthor-mywork-is-not-about-design/8615593.article>. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Thomas Common. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Edinburgh: T. Common, 1908. Print. Pallister, James. “The Criteria for Architecture Is Humbleness,” Says Kengo Kuma.” Dezeen. N.p., 11 Mar. 2014. Web. Papadakēs, A., Geoffrey Broadbent, and Maggie Toy. Free Spirit in Architecture: Omnibus Volume. London: Academy Editions, 1992. Parker, Ian. “High Rise (Bjarke Ingels Interview).” The New Yorker. Sept 10, 2012, Vol.88(27), p.76 Patt, Doug. “E Is For Ego.” How to Architect. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012. 18-22. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Plume, 2005. Rothko, Mark, and Christopher Rothko. The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2004. Print. Rosenfield, arissa. "A First Look at Peter Zumthor's Design for the LACMA." ArchDaily. 05 June 2013. Web. <http://www.archdaily.com/383406/a-first-look-at-pete -zumthor-sdesign-for-the-lacma/>. Roy, Debdulal Dutta. "Personality Model of Fine Artists." Creativity Research Journal 9.4 (1996): 391-94. Saunders, William S. “Stocktaking.” The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader. Minneapolis, Minn.: U of Minnesota, 2007. Schumann, Sven and Bonke, Johannes. “Daniel Libeskind Interview.” The Talks. 7 Mar. 2014. Web. Silvia, Paul J., James C. Kaufman, Roni Reiter-Palmon, and Benjamin Wigert. "Cantankerous Creativity: Honesty–Humility, Agreeableness, and the HEXACO Structure of Creative Achievement." Personality and Individual Differences 51.5 (2011): 687-89. Silvia, Paul J., Emily C. Nusbaum, Christopher Berg, Christopher Martin, and Alejandra O’Connor. "Openness to Experience, Plasticity, and Creativity: Exploring Lower-order, Highorder, and Interactive Effects." Journal of Research in Personality 43.6 (2009): 1087-090. "Profile: Builder o Dreams or Monuments?: Peter Palumbo, a Visionary at the Arts CouncilProfile: Builder o Dreams or Monuments?: Peter Palumbo, a Visionary at the Arts

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Bourdain, Anthony. "Detroit." Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown. CNN. 10 Nov. 2013. Television. Brown, Brene. “The Power of Vulnerability.” TED. TED Talks, June 2010. Miralles, Enric. SCI_ARC, Los Angeles. 1 Mar. 1989. Web. <http://sma.sciarc.edu/lecturer/ enric-miralles/>. EMBT Miralles Tagliabue Work in Progress. Perf. Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue. YouTube. VIDEOSEMBT, 30 Mar. 2009. Web. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKl5YDl_iPk>. Mike Wallace Interviews Frank Lloyd Wright. Perf. Frank Lloyd Wright. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas At Austin. 1957. My Architect: A Son’s Journey. Prod. Nathaniel. Kahn. Dir. Nathaniel. Kahn. A New Yorker Films Release, 2003. “Interview with Zaha Hadid.” Interview by Becky Anderson. CNN International. Connect the World, 15 Apr. 2010. Television. Transcript. The Blues. Prod. Martin Scorsese. PBS, 2003.

Art William Blake. The Ancient of Days. 1784 Beverly Buchanann. Modern House. 2011 at Boston ICA; wood, copper, steel, and glue Mark Rothko. Black, Red and Black. 1968

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Thank you Mack, Elena, Marcel, Mom, and Dad.

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